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Caper Sauce (Make a butter sauce and stir)
Make a butter sauce and stir into one tablespoonful of lemon juice, two of capers, and one of essence of anchovy.
A one-line finishing sauce that assumes you already know how to make the base. Everything depends on what "butter sauce" meant in 1900.
- "Butter sauce" means drawn butterIn books of this period it is a thickened sauce, not melted butter: roughly 1 tablespoon flour cooked in 2 tablespoons butter, then about a cup of hot water or light stock whisked in and simmered a few minutes, with a further lump of butter beaten in off the heat. A cup of base sauce is the right scale for the quantities given here.
- Essence of anchovyA commercial bottled anchovy extract, thin and sharply salty, once sold alongside mushroom ketchup. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest survivor; use about a teaspoon, since paste is more concentrated than the old essence, and taste before adding more.
- Salt last, if at allAnchovy and capers both carry a great deal of salt. Season the base sauce lightly, add the flavourings, then judge.
- Add the acid off the heatLemon juice and caper brine stirred into a simmering flour-thickened sauce will thin it and can make it taste raw. Pull the pan off the burner first and stir them through the warm sauce.
- CapersDrain them; chop the larger capers only if you want the flavour spread evenly rather than in bursts. A tablespoon of the pickling brine in place of some of the lemon juice is a reasonable substitution.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup, enough for four. It suits boiled mutton or poached white fish.
Caper sauce belongs to the family of English "butter sauces" that dominated nineteenth-century cookery: a flour-and-butter base stretched with water, then pointed with something sharp or salty. Capers themselves are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean import that reached British and American kitchens in vinegar-filled jars and kept well, which may be part of why they turn up so often in books written before refrigeration. The addition of anchovy essence is characteristic of the period's commercial pantry, when bottled fish and mushroom extracts stood in for the depth a long-simmered stock would give; such essences are generally traced to the eighteenth-century English taste for fish-based ketchups.