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Caper Sauce
(Salsa con capperi) This sauce is especially adapted for boiled fish and the quantities are for a little more than one pound of fish. The ingredients are two ounces of butter, two ounces of capers soaked in vinegar one teaspoonful of flour, salt, pepper and vinegar.
Boil the fish and, when it is left warm in its broth, prepare the sauce. Put on the fire the flour with half of the butter, mix it and when it begins to take color, add the remaining butter.
Let boil a little and then pour one half cup of the broth of the fish: season generously with salt and pepper and take the saucepan from the fire.
Then throw in it the capers, half whole, half chopped, and some drops of vinegar, but taste it to dose the sauce so that it is pleasant to the taste and as thick as liquid cream.
It is well to observe here that these sauces in which butter is used together with acids, such as vinegar, are not for weak stomachs and should be partaken of sparingly. 58
A small warm butter-and-flour sauce built on the poaching liquid of the fish it will dress. The whole thing takes about five minutes and is best made while the fish sits in its broth.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons (half a stick); two ounces of capers is a scant 1/2 cup, drained. One teaspoon of flour for that much butter gives a barely-bound sauce rather than a béchamel.
- The hinge: take it off the heat before the capers go inThe recipe is explicit that the pan leaves the fire before the capers and vinegar are added. Boiling capers dulls their perfume and boiling the vinegar drives off the sharpness that gives the sauce its point.
- Add the butter in two stagesCook the flour in half the butter until it takes a little color, then add the rest and let it boil briefly before the broth goes in. Keep the heat moderate so the sauce stays glossy rather than greasy.
- The broth is the seasoningHalf a cup of the fish's own poaching liquid carries whatever aromatics went into the pot. If the fish was poached in plain salted water the sauce will be flat; a court bouillon with wine, bay, onion and peppercorns is worth the trouble.
- Capers soaked in vinegarThe recipe assumes capers held in vinegar; salt-packed capers were also sold and need a soak. Modern brine-packed capers are already acidulated — rinse them, drain well, and go carefully with the added vinegar since the brine brings its own.
- Judging the consistency"As thick as liquid cream" means it coats a spoon thinly and pours freely. If it tightens too much, loosen with more warm broth rather than water.
- YieldEnough for a little over a pound of fish, which serves two or three. It does not reheat well; make it at the last moment.
- The closing warningThe remark about butter with acids being unsuited to "weak stomachs" reflects nineteenth-century dietetic thinking about digestion, not any hazard. Read it as period commentary.
The Italian Cook Book (1919), compiled by Maria Gentile, draws heavily on Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, the 1891 book generally credited with giving a unified Italian domestic cookery its written form — and the closing aside about weak stomachs is very much Artusi's voice, since he interleaved digestive advice with his recipes throughout. Capers are the unopened flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a scrubby Mediterranean shrub that grows out of old walls across southern Italy and the islands; they were preserved in salt or vinegar precisely because the fresh bud is unpleasantly bitter. Pairing them with poached fish is an old southern habit, the sharpness cutting the richness of butter and the blandness of boiled flesh. What marks this as a book of its moment is the use of butter rather than oil, and the roux: Artusi wrote for a northern, bourgeois readership, and this sauce sits closer to French technique than to anything from Naples or Sicily.