Caper Sauce
From The housekeeper's guide to preserved meats, fruits, vegetables, &c, 1880
This method reduces acidity in the sauce.
Presented as published in 1880. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation below, not the original instructions.
A modern interpretation · AI-generated from the original record
Ingredients
Method
As published
This recipe was extracted from The housekeeper's guide to preserved meats, fruits, vegetables, &c (1880), page 39. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.
caper sauce for boiled mutton, though many persons, with boiled mutton, prefer capers whole. This latter is the most economical form of serving them with meat, as a few can be turned into a small dish with a little of the vinegar, and those not eaten can be put back. Caper sauce is a mixture of chopped capers and melted butter. It will be too often found that when cooks make melted butter they make a very much larger quantity than is required. A common mistake with English cooks is to imagine that melted butter is simply milk thickened with a little butter and flour. Real butter sauce, as it should properly be called, is a far nicer and at the same time a more expensive dish. The proper method of making good butter sauce is to take, say a quarter of a pound of butter, and divide this into six equal parts. Take one of these parts, and mix it with an equal weight of flour. Melt this in the oven, and mix it in thoroughly with the flour. Add to this a quarter of a pint of water, and stir the whole over the fire till it becomes slightly thick. Then gradually add and dissolve in this the remaining five pieces of the buttei . Should the butter sauce show any tendency to curdle, it can be instantly brought back into its proper state by the addition of a small quantity of cold water, or, better still, a small lump of ice. Caper sauce is sim- ply capers chopped fine and added to the butter sauce as we have mentioned. When the butter sauce is made with plenty of butter, water will be found far better than milk ; when the caper sauce is made rich in the way wre have described, half a ladleful, or a little more, is ample for each person. House- keepers would do well to notice the quantity of melted butter usually made by ordinary cooks. They will find as a rule as much is made for four persons as would suffice for twelve. One very use- ful method of using capers is to make — CAPER SAUCE PIQUANTE.— It will be found that in the majority of cookery books the quantity of vine- gar given is very excessive. To make sauce piquante, chop up a couple of shalots, a couple of green gherkins, and a dessert-spoonful of French capers. Place these in a small stewpan, with two tablespoonfuls of French vinegar. Allow' these to simmer gently over the fire till the whole of the vinegar is nearly boiled awray. Then add a quarter of a, pint of good brown grav
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Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.