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Caper Butter
Chop one table-spoon of capers very fine, rub through a sieve with a wooden spoon, and mix them with a salt-spoon of salt, quarter of a salt-spoon of pepper, and one ounce of cold butter. Put a layer of this butter on a dish, and serve fish on it.
A compound butter in miniature — the whole thing is a tablespoon of capers worked into two tablespoons of butter. The only technical demand is that everything stay cold until the fish lands on it.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon. So the recipe wants about 1/4 teaspoon salt and a scant 1/16 teaspoon pepper — a couple of grinds.
- One ounce of butterTwo tablespoons, or a quarter stick. That is a small quantity; it will dress one or two fillets, not a platter for six. Scale up by keeping the ratio of one tablespoon minced capers to one ounce butter.
- Salt the butter yourselfSalt is listed separately here, so season as directed. If you use salted butter, taste before adding any — brined capers bring their own salt as well.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis was the Victorian route to a smooth paste before food processors. Chopping the capers to a near-purée on the board, then mashing with the flat of a knife, gets you the same texture with less waste. Skip the sieve if you would rather see flecks of caper.
- Capers, drained and driedBrine-packed capers should be drained and blotted or the butter will separate and weep. Salt-packed capers need a rinse and a soak, then the same drying, and you may want no added salt at all.
- Keep the butter coldThe instruction specifies cold butter. Spread on the serving dish as a firm layer, it will soften under the fish as it is served; working it soft and letting it warm defeats that.
- ServingBest under plainly cooked white fish — grilled, broiled or poached — where there is no competing sauce. A layer on the dish rather than a pat on top means every piece meets the butter.
Compound butters — butter worked with herbs, anchovy, shellfish coral, lemon or capers — were a familiar feature of nineteenth-century fish cookery, a way of producing something sauce-like without a stockpot or a roux. It functions as a sauce, delivered in solid form. Capers themselves are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, and in an American kitchen of the period they were an imported bottled good rather than a garden crop. The technique of laying the butter beneath the fish rather than over it is a small piece of period service logic — the heat of the fish does the melting, and the sauce arrives at the table already made.