caper sauce

5.4

A rich creamy sauce made with capers for fish or vegetables

noun

: salsa de alcaparras

I sat alone at the table for a long time before I finally ate both of our breakfasts, eggs Benedict and trout fried in caper sauce, breathing out the whole time.
lemon-caper sauce

Examples

She prepared a rich caper sauce, adding it to the sautéed vegetables for extra flavor.
The grilled chicken was delicious, especially with the homemade caper sauce on top.
"With your lemon-caper sauce, it was perfect."

Fiction book (1995)
For dinner, we enjoyed salmon fillets complemented by a creamy caper sauce that enhanced the dish.

Surface Forms

caper sauce singular

caper sauces plural

Morphology

caper + sauce

The meaning 'a sauce flavored with capers' follows directly from combining 'caper' (the pickled flower bud) with 'sauce' (a condiment), so the overall sense is transparent. The ingredient+"sauce" composition is a common, cross-linguistic culinary pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the meaning.

Etymology

Caper sauce may come from old coastal cooks who mixed small pickled capers into a rich white sauce for fish. Those little salty flower buds gave the sauce a bright, tangy taste, so the name now means a creamy sauce flavored with capers.