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Caper Sauce (For boiled mutton is drawn)
Caper for boiled mutton is drawn butter sauce, with two teaspoonfuls of capers and one tablespoonful of lemon juice added after the sauce is cooked.
A three-line finishing sauce that assumes you already know how to make drawn butter, which is the part a modern cook has to reconstruct.
- What drawn butter isNot clarified butter, despite the name. In American books of this period it is a white sauce built on butter, flour and hot water: roughly 2 tablespoons butter melted with 1 tablespoon flour, then about a cup of boiling water whisked in and simmered until it thickens, with salt and pepper. A second lump of butter is usually stirred in off the heat for gloss.
- The hingeBoth the capers and the lemon juice go in after the sauce has finished cooking, exactly as written. Prolonged simmering blunts capers, and acid is generally added off the heat to a flour-thickened sauce, which can thin if it is boiled hard after the juice goes in.
- CapersTwo teaspoonfuls is modest by current taste; a tablespoon of drained capers is closer to what most people expect now. Rinse salt-packed capers, drain brined ones, and leave them whole rather than chopping.
- Water, not stockPeriod drawn butter was made with water rather than stock. A ladle of the mutton's cooking liquor gives a fuller sauce, though it will also carry the salt from the pot, so season at the end.
- YieldAbout a cup, which serves four to six alongside a boiled joint. It thickens as it cools and should be sent to the table hot.
- Lemon juiceOne tablespoon is bracing against fatty mutton, but add it in two stages and taste; bottled juice is sharper and flatter than fresh.
Caper sauce with boiled mutton is one of the fixed pairings of nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American cookery, common enough that a cookbook could describe it in a single sentence and assume the rest. The capers are the flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, pickled in brine or packed in salt, and their function here is the same as the lemon juice, cutting the richness of a fatty joint that has been simmered rather than roasted. Its appearance in the Game section of this book is almost certainly a matter of the sauces having been gathered near the meat chapters rather than any connection to game, since boiled mutton was firmly everyday domestic cooking.