To make a quarter of a pint, take a table-spoonful of capers, and two tea-spoonfuls of vinegar.
The present fashion of cutting capers is to mince one-third of them very fine, and divide the others in half; put them into a quarter of a pint of melted butter, or good thickened gravy ([No. 329]); stir them the same way as you did the melted butter, or it will oil.
Obs.—Some boil, and mince fine a few leaves of parsley, or chervil, or tarragon, and add these to the sauce; others the juice of half a Seville orange, or lemon.
Mem.—Keep the caper bottle very closely corked, and do not use any of the caper liquor: if the capers are not well covered with it, they will immediately spoil; and it is an excellent ingredient in hashes, &c. The Dutch use it as a fish sauce, mixing it with melted butter.
Mock Caper Sauce.—(No. 275, or [No. 295].)
Cut some pickled green pease, French beans, gherkins, or nasturtiums, into bits the size of capers; put them into half a pint of melted butter, with two tea-spoonfuls of lemon-juice, or nice vinegar.
Oyster Sauce.—(No. 278.)
Choose plump and juicy natives for this purpose: don’t take them out of their shell till you put them into the stew-pan, see [Obs.] to [No. 181].
To make good oyster sauce for half a dozen hearty fish-eaters, you cannot have less than three or four dozen oysters. Save their liquor; strain it, and put it and them into a stew-pan: as soon as they boil, and the fish plump, take them off the fire, and pour the contents of the stew-pan into a sieve over a clean basin; wash the stew-pan out with hot water, and put into it the strained liquor, with about an equal quantity of milk, and about two ounces and a half of butter, with which you have well rubbed a large table-spoonful of flour; give it a boil up, and pour it through a sieve into a basin (that the sauce may be quite smooth), and then back again into the saucepan; now shave the oysters, and (if you have the honour of making sauce for “a committee of taste,” take away the gristly part also) put in only the soft part of them: if they are very large, cut them in half, and set them by the fire to keep hot: “if they boil after, they will become hard.”