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Caper Sauce
To a pint of drawn butter, add three table-spoons of capers. Serve with boiled or roast mutton. Another method is the following: Fifteen minutes before the mutton is done, melt two table spoons butter in a sauce-pan, stir into it one table-spoon flour; when thoroughly mixed add half a pint of the liquor in which the mut ton is boiling, and half a pint of milk, season with pepper and salt, cook a few minutes (to swell the grains of the flour), and just before serving (in order that their color may not be lost by standing) add two heaped table-spoons capers.
Two versions of the same sauce: one built on drawn butter, one a proper roux thinned with mutton broth and milk. The second is the better sauce and the one worth making.
- "Drawn butter" is not melted butter"Drawn butter" usually is not simply melted butter -- in most nineteenth-century American books drawn butter is a butter sauce lightly thickened with flour, made with water or stock, though the term is sometimes used loosely for plain melted butter. Period recipes are butter-heavy: a half pint typically takes something like a quarter-pound of butter, a spoonful of flour and the liquid.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pint is 1 cup, so the second method makes about 2 cups of sauce, enough for six to eight servings alongside a leg or shoulder. The caper proportions in the two methods work out much the same: three tablespoons to a pint of drawn butter, two heaped spoons to the 2 cups of the second sauce.
- The hinge: add the capers at the endThe recipe holds them back so their colour is not lost by standing in the sauce. Stir them in just before the sauce goes to table.
- Skim the mutton liquorA cup of broth ladled straight off boiling mutton carries a lot of fat, and mutton fat sets waxy on the tongue as the sauce cools. Skim it, or draw the liquid from below the surface.
- Cook the roux before the liquid goes inThe original asks only that butter and flour be "thoroughly mixed"; a short gentle cooking of the paste first will cook out the raw-flour taste. Then add the broth first and the milk second, whisking, to avoid lumps.
- "A few minutes to swell the grains of the flour"The recipe's own few minutes at a bare simmer; the starch needs a little time to hydrate and thicken, or the sauce tastes of raw flour paste.
- Capers and their brineModern capers come in vinegar brine or in salt. Brined capers can go in with a spoon of their liquor for extra sharpness; salt-packed capers should be rinsed and soaked briefly, or the sauce will need no added salt at all.
- Season lastBetween the mutton liquor and the capers there is already salt in play. Taste after the capers are in, not before.
Caper sauce with boiled mutton was one of the fixed pairings of English cookery, carried into American books wholesale -- Victorian dinner tables treated leg of mutton and caper sauce almost as a single dish. The capers themselves are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, and they arrived in American kitchens as an imported bottled good. Mutton -- the meat of a mature sheep -- has largely disappeared from American retail, which is why the pairing now sounds archaic even though the sauce works perfectly well with lamb.