Capparis spinosa, the Mediterranean caper of the bud and the caperberry; and, separately, Capparis decidua, the ker of the Thar Desert, whose small red fruit is a staple of Rajasthani cooking and is not interchangeable with it
Origin: Two homelands. <em>Capparis spinosa</em> is native across the whole dry Mediterranean and West Asian arc, from Iberia through the Levant and Anatolia to Iran and Central Asia, with the Levantine hills amongst the oldest documented gathering grounds. <em>Capparis decidua</em> belongs to the Thar Desert and the arid north-west of the Indian subcontinent.
The caper has largely refused to be domesticated, and that refusal is the most interesting thing about it.
Capparis spinosa is a sprawling shrub of hot, poor, stony ground, with a taproot that can go down ten metres or more in search of water. It grows out of cliffs, screes, ruins, and old mortar, and it is at its happiest in exactly the places where nothing else will grow: the walls of the Colosseum, the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the terraces of dry volcanic islands. Theophrastus noticed more than two thousand years ago that it resents cultivation and does better left alone, and the observation still holds. Much of the world's crop is gathered from wild or semi-wild bushes rather than grown in rows.
What is harvested is a flower that is never allowed to happen. The caper is the unopened bud, picked whilst still tight and green. If it is missed, it opens into one of the more extravagant flowers in the Mediterranean, four white petals around a shock of long violet stamens, and it lasts a single day, opening at dawn and finished by the afternoon. The entire industry exists to prevent that. Bushes are picked over every eight to ten days through the summer, by hand, in the early morning, which is why capers are expensive and why the work has never been mechanised.
If the flower is allowed to open and set, the result is the second harvest: the caperberry, an elongated fruit on a long stalk, called cucunci in Sicily, alcaparrón in Spain, and taperas in Portugal. It is milder and seedier than the bud and is eaten whole, usually as something to drink beside. In the Aegean the young shoots and leaves are pickled too, so a single bush can yield three quite different foods.
Nothing here is edible raw. A fresh bud is bitter and unpleasant, and curing is not a way of keeping capers but the way of making them. Salt or brine draws out water and sets off the enzymatic reaction that produces the flavour, over weeks. Dry-salting is the better method and is what the Sicilian islands use; brine and vinegar are quicker, cheaper, and coarser, and vinegar in particular tends to bury the caper under itself.
The caper barely travelled, because it was already everywhere it needed to be. Capparis spinosa is native to the entire dry Mediterranean and West Asian arc, so from Spain to Iran no one had to be given it; they had only to work out what to do with it. What moved were techniques, words, and, eventually, jars.
The Greeks named it. Kápparis passed into Latin as capparis and from there into every western European language, and Greek and Roman writers between them established the whole method: Theophrastus on the plant's obstinacy, Dioscorides on its uses, Pliny on the difference between local and imported capers, and Columella with a set of instructions for pickling in brine that a Sicilian curer would still recognise.
The Arab expansion did two things to it. It carried caper husbandry west along North Africa and into Sicily and al-Andalus, where the terraced, dry-stone caper gardens of Pantelleria are generally credited to that period; and it gave Iberia its word, al-kabar becoming Spanish and Portuguese alcaparra, so that the peninsula ended up with an Arabic name for a plant its Roman predecessors had called something else entirely. From Seville the caper went to the Indies in the sixteenth century and settled into the Spanish colonial kitchen with startling completeness: capers with olives is the signature of Veracruz fish, of Puerto Rican alcaparrado, and of the picadillo eaten from Cuba to the Philippines.
Northwards it moved as a preserved luxury rather than a plant. France built sauces on it, and Provençal tapeno gave its name to tapenade, a paste most people assume is named for the olives that make up most of it. Britain took the French sauce idea and married it, permanently, to boiled mutton. German cookery took it further still, into the caper cream sauce of Königsberger Klopse. Italian emigration then carried the salted capers of the south to New York, where they turned up in piccata and, from a quite different direction, on the smoked salmon of the Jewish appetising counter.
A separate and unconnected story runs in the Thar Desert, where Capparis decidua, the ker, is a different species used in a different way: not the bud but the small red fruit, dried and cooked with desert bean pods into ker sangri, the dish of a region with almost no vegetables at all.
The caper is a seasoning rather than an ingredient, and it does one particular job better than anything else: it puts sharp, salty, mustard-edged punctuation into something rich, oily, or bland. Fish, butter, eggs, veal, aubergine, tomato, and olive oil are its natural company, and the pattern holds from a Sicilian caponata to a Berlin plate of Klopse to a New York bagel.
That mustard edge is not a metaphor. Capers contain glucocapparin, a glucosinolate, and when the bud is crushed or cured the compound breaks down into methyl isothiocyanate. It is the same class of chemistry that makes mustard, horseradish, wasabi, and rocket pungent, and it is a fair reflection of the botany: the Capparaceae sit in the Brassicales, next door to the cabbage family. A caper is closer kin to a mustard seed than to anything else likely to be on the plate beside it.
Production and reputation have parted company. Morocco grows more capers than anywhere else and eats very few of them, exporting almost the entire crop; Turkey harvests enormous quantities from wild bushes; Spain is the great processor and exporter and puts its name on a good deal of fruit grown elsewhere. Meanwhile the capers that connoisseurs argue about come from two small Italian islands, Pantelleria in the Sicilian Channel and Salina in the Aeolians, both of which hold protected designations and both of which cure in sea salt rather than vinegar.
Buying them is worth a paragraph, because the difference is large. Salt-packed capers, rinsed and briefly soaked, taste of caper; brined ones taste substantially of brine, and capers in vinegar taste of vinegar. Size is graded from the smallest up, nonpareilles under seven millimetres being the most prized, though the larger grades are better value and are perfectly good in anything cooked. One thing that alarms people needlessly: salt-packed capers often carry small white crystalline spots, which are neither mould nor undissolved salt but rutin, a flavonoid, crystallising out. Capers are amongst the richest known dietary sources of it.
And there is a second caper altogether. In Rajasthan the ker, the fruit of Capparis decidua, is dried and rehydrated and cooked with sangri pods into the defining dish of Marwar. It is a caper by botany and by name, and it has nothing at all to do with a jar of buds in brine.
Historical Journey of Caper
The Levantine Hills & the Eastern Mediterranean Arc — c. 8000 BCE
The caper is native to a very wide band of dry country running from Iberia through North Africa and the Levant into Anatolia, Iran, and Central Asia, and this point stands for the eastern end of it, where the plant is best documented earliest.
Caper seeds are amongst the most common plant remains recovered from early Near Eastern sites, turning up in the Levantine hills and the Jordan rift from the Mesolithic onwards, alongside wild pistachio, almond, and fig. That does not mean anyone was cultivating it. It means people were gathering it, which is what has happened to the caper ever since: it has never been properly domesticated and most of the world's crop still comes from wild or barely tended bushes.
What the plant offered was a food from ground that offered nothing else. The caper grows out of cliffs and screes and later out of walls and ruins, sends a taproot down ten metres or more, and fruits through the hottest and driest part of the year when little else is producing. In a landscape of thin soil and long summers that is a considerable thing.
This point carries no dish, and that is deliberate. The Levant does pickle capers and caper shoots and sells them in the souks of Damascus and Beirut, but the cuisine that made the caper famous developed later and further west, in the Aegean, in Rome, and above all on the volcanic islands off Sicily. The bush is here; the cooking is downstream.
The Thar Desert & Marwar, Rajasthan — c. 3000 BCE
This is the atlas's second caper, and it is a different plant doing a different job in a place the Mediterranean caper never reached.
Capparis decidua, the ker or kair, is a leafless spiny shrub of the Thar Desert and the arid north-west of the subcontinent. It drops what few leaves it manages and photosynthesises through its green twigs, which is where the botanical name comes from. What is eaten is not the bud but the fruit: a small round berry, bright red when ripe, harvested green, and almost always dried rather than used fresh.
The cooking it belongs to was shaped by having nothing else. Marwar, the desert country around Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, has little water, few vegetables, and long stretches when nothing green is available at all, so the Marwari kitchen was built on things that keep: pulses, dried desert fruits, buttermilk, chilli, and clarified butter. Ker sangri is the emblem of it, the dried ker berry cooked with sangri, the long thin pod of the khejri tree, into a dish that is sour, chewy, fiery, and entirely unlike anything on the Mediterranean side of this journey. It travels well, keeps for days without refrigeration, and was carried by traders and armies across a desert for exactly that reason.
The ker also goes into pickle, ker ka achar, and into mixed panchkuta, the five desert ingredients cooked together. It is a caper by botany and by name and it will not substitute for one in any recipe on the western half of this map.
Santorini, the Cyclades & Classical Greece — c. 350 BCE
Greece gave the caper its name and the Aegean islands gave it the most complete treatment it receives anywhere.
Kápparis passed from Greek into Latin and from Latin into every western European language, so a Greek word is on the jar in Berlin and New York. Theophrastus, writing around 300 BCE, made the observation that still governs the crop: the caper dislikes cultivation and does better wild, which is why it has never been properly farmed. Dioscorides set out its medicinal uses a few centuries later, and both of them treat it as an entirely familiar plant rather than a novelty.
What the Cyclades do that almost nowhere else does is eat the whole bush. The buds are pickled, the caperberries are pickled, and so are the young shoots and leaves, kaparofylla, which are stripped from the stem, brined, and used as a vegetable rather than a condiment. On Santorini and Tinos the result goes into kaparosalata, a coarse spread of pounded caper leaves and buds with onion and vinegar, eaten on bread with the local wine, and onto fava, the yellow split pea purée that is the island's other protected product.
The islands suit the plant precisely. Volcanic rock, no water to speak of, salt wind, and a fierce summer are ruinous for most crops and are what the caper wants. On Santorini the bushes grow along the terrace walls above the vines, and the two things the island is known for come off the same ground.
Rome & the Roman Empire — c. 50 CE
Rome contributed the method rather than a dish, and the method is why capers exist as a food at all.
A raw caper bud is bitter and inedible. Curing is not preservation added to a finished ingredient; it is the process that creates the ingredient, breaking down the bud's chemistry over weeks into something worth eating. Columella set out the Roman procedure in the De Re Rustica in the first century, packing the buds in strong brine and vinegar, and a curer on Pantelleria today would recognise the essentials of it. Pliny discusses capers at length, distinguishes the local crop from imported ones and prefers the local, and passes on the usual warnings about foreign produce. Apicius uses them in sauces for fish and for boiled meats, which is precisely where they still end up.
This point is a transit rather than a destination, and deliberately so. Rome codified the technique and the Latin name, and both then travelled: south with Roman Africa into Ifriqiya, north-west into Gaul where Provence would eventually make a paste named after the plant, and northwards up the peninsula. The great Italian caper cooking is not Roman. It grew up much later and considerably further south, on two small volcanic islands that Rome would have thought of as the edge of nowhere.
Cap Bon, Ifriqiya & the Maghreb — c. 800 CE
North Africa is where the caper is grown, and it is not where the caper is eaten, which makes this point one of the clearer illustrations in the atlas of the gap between production and appetite.
Morocco produces more capers than any other country on earth, chiefly around Safi, Taounate, and the Fès-Meknès hills, and exports very nearly the whole crop, most of it in barrels of brine to Spanish and Italian processors who finish it, jar it, and put their own names on it. A good deal of what is sold as Spanish caper began life on a Moroccan hillside. Turkey does much the same with an enormous wild harvest. It is the same arrangement Guatemala has with cardamom: the country that grows the most eats the least.
Tunisia is the exception, and it is why this point sits on Cap Bon rather than in Morocco. The Nabeul peninsula is caper country and Tunisians actually cook with them. Salata mechouia, the grilled pepper and tomato salad pounded coarse and dressed with olive oil, takes capers as a matter of course, and they turn up through the wider repertoire of pickles and cooked salads that opens a Tunisian meal.
The Arab agricultural expansion that ran along this coast from the seventh century onwards carried caper husbandry with it in both directions: north across the strait to Sicily, where the Aghlabids of Ifriqiya took the island from 827 and where the terraced caper gardens of Pantelleria are generally traced to that period, and west into al-Andalus, which took the Arabic name along with the plant.
Pantelleria & Salina, Sicily — c. 900 CE
Two small volcanic islands make the best capers in the world, and neither of them is comfortable to live on, which is rather the point.
Pantelleria sits in the channel between Sicily and Tunisia, closer to Africa than to Italy, and is a heap of black lava with almost no fresh water and a wind that blows without pause. Salina, in the Aeolians north of Sicily, is scarcely gentler. Both grow capers on terraced dry-stone giardini, both hold protected designations, and both cure by the same method: the buds are graded by size and packed in layers of coarse sea salt in a barrel, turned and re-salted over some weeks whilst the salt draws out the water and the flavour develops. No vinegar comes near them. The result is denser, greener, and more floral than anything in a jar of brine, and it tastes of caper rather than of what the caper was kept in.
The cultivation is credited to the Arab period, when Ifriqiya took Sicily and brought its dry-farming and terracing with it, and the crop has been the islands' second export after wine ever since. On Pantelleria the caper harvest runs from late May to August, every bush picked over roughly every ten days, always at first light.
Sicilian cooking then built on it in a way that no other cuisine has matched. Caponata, the sweet-and-sour aubergine dish that is the island's most exported idea, is unthinkable without capers against the vinegar and sugar. Insalata pantesca, the potato, tomato, onion, oregano, and caper salad of the island itself, is a whole meal built round them. And the Palermitan habit of drowning cauliflower and broccoli in wine with anchovy, olives, and capers turns a plain vegetable into something with an argument in it.
Murcia, Ballobar & al-Andalus — c. 1000 CE
Iberia had capers growing wild on its own hillsides throughout the Roman centuries and still ended up calling them by an Arabic name, which tells you which period actually organised the crop.
Andalusi Arabic al-kabar became Spanish and Portuguese alcaparra, displacing whatever the Latin had left behind, and the fruit became alcaparrón. The same thing happened to anise, to saffron, to the aubergine, and to a long list besides; it is the standard fingerprint of the Andalusi agricultural revolution, which reorganised Iberian growing wholesale and left its vocabulary behind in the language.
Spain is now the world's great caper processor rather than its great grower, importing raw material from Morocco and Turkey, finishing it, and exporting it under Spanish labels. The genuinely Spanish crop is concentrated in Murcia, in the Aragonese village of Ballobar, which holds an annual caper festival, and across Andalusia and Mallorca.
What Spain does with them that the rest of Europe does not is take the fruit as seriously as the bud. Alcaparrones, the caperberries, brined whole with their stalks on and served in a saucer beside a glass of vermouth or a dry sherry, are a fixture of the tapas bar, eaten by the stalk in one bite and quite unlike the buds in either texture or strength. Capers themselves go into escabeche, into the cold sauces served with fried fish, and into the olive-and-caper mixtures that would later cross the Atlantic and become the backbone of Spanish colonial cooking from Veracruz to San Juan.
Marseille & Provence — c. 1400 CE
France gave the caper its most influential role, which is not as a garnish but as an acid in a sauce, and Provence gave it the best name it has anywhere.
Tapeno is the Provençal word for the caper, and tapenade is named after it. Nearly everyone assumes the paste is named for the olives that make up the bulk of it; it is named for the capers, and the naming is a fair judgement about which ingredient is doing the work. Take the capers out and what remains is crushed olives.
The French classical kitchen then built a whole family of preparations on the same principle. Capers cut fat and richness with salt and acid at once, which is why they belong with brown butter, with hard-boiled egg, and with anything oily. Raie au beurre noir, skate in nut-brown butter sharpened with capers and vinegar, is the clearest demonstration of it and one of the great cheap dishes of France. Sauce gribiche sets capers and cornichons and herbs against chopped egg; sauce ravigote and sauce rémoulade work the same seam; and steak tartare would be flat without them.
Provence grows its own along the dry limestone of the Var and the Vaucluse, though nothing like the quantity it uses. What matters here is less the crop than the technique, because it is the French sauce idea, rather than the Mediterranean plant, that went on to reach Britain and Prussia.
Veracruz & New Spain — c. 1600 CE
Capers crossed the Atlantic in the barrels of the Spanish fleet, and Veracruz is where they landed. The port was the single legal entry point for Spanish shipping into New Spain for the better part of three centuries, and the cooking that grew up around it is the most European in Mexico, built on the things that survived a long crossing in brine and oil: olives, capers, almonds, and dried spices.
Pescado a la veracruzana is the result and the emblem. A whole fish, classically red snapper, is baked under a sauce of tomato, onion, garlic, olives, capers, and pickled jalapeños, with bay and oregano and a little of the pickling liquor. Every element of it except the tomato and the chilli came off a Spanish ship, and every element except the olives and capers is American; it is a genuinely even collaboration rather than one cuisine imposed on another, which is unusual and is much of why the dish is treated as a national one rather than a regional curiosity.
The olive-and-caper pairing that arrived here went much further than one dish. It is the register of Mexican picadillo, of the stuffing for chiles en nogada, and of any number of colonial-era braises, and it travelled onward around the whole Spanish Caribbean. Mexico grows no capers to speak of and never has. It has simply been buying them for four hundred years.
San Juan, Havana & the Spanish Caribbean — c. 1620 CE
The Spanish Caribbean took the olive-and-caper habit and made it structural. It is not an accent here; it is one of the two or three things that tell you what kitchen you are standing in.
Puerto Rico gave the combination a name and sells it in a jar. Alcaparrado is manzanilla olives, capers, and strips of red pimiento packed together in brine, and it is a pantry staple rather than a speciality, spooned into dishes by the tablespoon without anyone stopping to consider it a flavouring. It goes into picadillo, the seasoned minced beef that fills alcapurrias and pastelillos and is eaten over rice by itself; into arroz con pollo; into ropa vieja in Cuba; and into the sofrito-based braises that run through the whole region.
The reason is partly historical and partly practical. Capers and olives keep indefinitely in a hot climate without refrigeration, they arrived reliably on Spanish ships, and their salt and acid do something useful to slow-cooked pork and beef and to a great deal of rice. What began as an imported European habit in the seventeenth century is now so thoroughly local that the imported half of it goes unnoticed.
Nothing here is grown locally. Every caper in a Caribbean kitchen has come several thousand miles, as it has since the first Spanish fleets, and that unbroken supply line is itself part of the story of what colonial trade left behind in a cuisine.
London & England — c. 1700 CE
Britain cannot grow capers and has nonetheless attached them, permanently and almost exclusively, to one thing: boiled mutton.
The pairing arrived through French cookery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had hardened into orthodoxy by the nineteenth. Caper sauce is a plain white sauce, made with butter and flour and some of the liquor the meat was boiled in, sharpened with a good spoonful of capers and a little of their vinegar; Mrs Beeton gives it, and so does practically every English household manual after her. Boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce was so standard a dinner that it turns up as shorthand for respectable English eating in Victorian fiction, and the sauce is still what a British cook reaches for beside lamb, and beside skate and salmon.
The logic is sound and is the same logic as everywhere else in this journey. Mutton is fatty and its boiling liquor is bland; capers supply salt and sharpness in one move and do it without a sauce having to be built around wine or stock. The dish survives most confidently in the roast form now, where the sauce is served alongside rather than poured over.
Britain also produced the best of the caper substitutes. Nasturtium seed pods, picked green and pickled in spiced vinegar, were sold and served as poor man's capers, and they are genuinely good rather than merely resourceful, with a peppery bite of their own. Broom buds and marsh marigold buds had their advocates in the older books. None of them shares the caper's chemistry, but a nasturtium pod put beside boiled mutton does the same work.
Naples, Ischia & Campania — c. 1800 CE
Naples took the salted capers of the islands and put them into the sauce that is now the most widely cooked caper dish in the world.
The southern Italian larder is built on things that keep, because for most of its history it had to be: salted anchovy, cured olive, dried chilli, tinned or bottled tomato, and salted capers. Put those five together with garlic and oil and you have spaghetti alla puttanesca, a sauce assembled entirely from a store cupboard in the time the pasta takes to boil, with nothing fresh in it at all. That is not a shortcoming; it is the design. Capers and anchovies between them supply all the salt the dish needs and most of its depth, which is why puttanesca is seasoned at the end and rarely at the beginning.
The dish's origins are argued over and its name more so. The usual account puts it in Naples or on Ischia in the middle of the twentieth century, with the most repeated story crediting the Ischian restaurateur Sandro Petti, and the various explanations of the name are all unverifiable and mostly retrospective. What is certain is that the combination is older than the dish, since capers, olives, and anchovies had been going into southern Italian sauces for centuries before anyone attached that word to them.
Capers run through the rest of the Neapolitan repertoire in the same register: over cold poached fish, in the sharp sauces served with boiled meat, on pizza with anchovy, and through the summer salads of tomato, bread, and oregano that are the same idea as the islands' insalata pantesca a little further north.
Turin & Piedmont, Italy — c. 1820 CE
Salted capers travelled north up the peninsula as a preserved commodity rather than as a plant, and northern Italy used them to build cold sauces of a refinement the south never bothered with.
Vitello tonnato is the great example and one of the odder great dishes in Europe: cold poached veal, sliced thin, under a sauce of tuna, anchovy, egg yolk, oil, lemon, and capers. It is Piedmontese, it appears in Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina in 1891 in a version thickened without mayonnaise, and it makes complete sense once you notice that Piedmont is landlocked and that its access to the sea was through the salt and preserved-fish trade with Liguria. A landlocked region put preserved tuna on veal because preserved tuna was what the sea sent it.
Salsa verde is the other, and it is the workhorse. Parsley, capers, anchovy, garlic, breadcrumb, vinegar, and oil, pounded or chopped fine, served with bollito misto, the great platter of boiled meats that is Piedmont and Lombardy's winter centrepiece. Boiled meat is mild and fatty and wants something aggressive beside it, and salsa verde is the northern Italian answer to exactly the problem the English solved with caper sauce and the French with gribiche.
Both dishes make the same point. In the north the caper is not an ingredient of the dish so much as an ingredient of the sauce that redeems it.
Königsberg, Berlin & Prussia — c. 1850 CE
Germany is a long way from any caper bush, and it produced the one dish in Europe where capers are the entire point of the sauce rather than a sharpener within it.
Königsberger Klopse are poached veal meatballs, bound with soaked bread and anchovy, served in a pale sauce of the poaching stock enriched with cream and egg yolk and loaded with capers and their liquor. The capers are not a garnish and not an accent; they are what the sauce tastes of, and a version made without them is a different and much duller dish. It comes from Königsberg in East Prussia, the city Kant never left, which after 1945 became Kaliningrad and Russian, so the dish now belongs to a Germany that no longer contains the place it is named after. It survived the displacement completely and is cooked across the country, a fixture of the canteen and of the Berlin Kneipe.
How capers reached the Prussian kitchen is a matter of two routes arriving at once. Mediterranean preserved goods came north through the Hanseatic trade and up the Baltic for centuries, and French cookery dominated the German aristocratic table through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and brought its caper sauces with it. The result is a dish that is French in technique, Baltic in its anchovy, and entirely German in the way it is eaten, with boiled potatoes and beetroot.
Capers turn up elsewhere in the German repertoire in the same French-descended way: in Frankfurter grüne Sauce variants, in the cold sauces for boiled beef, and in the herring salads of the north.
New York City, USA — c. 1900 CE
Two separate migrations put capers on the New York table within a few decades of one another, from opposite ends of Europe and with no connection at all except the city.
The first was Italian. Southern Italians arriving from the 1880s brought the salted capers of Sicily and Campania with them, and the restaurant cooking that developed in New York over the following half-century turned them into piccata: a thin escalope, floured and fried, deglazed with lemon, white wine, butter, and a great many capers. The dish is Italian-American rather than Italian, and the caper load is characteristic of the difference; an Italian cook would use fewer and a New York cook uses enough that the sauce is visibly full of them. It is now on menus worldwide and is, by volume, one of the largest single uses of capers in the world.
The second was Ashkenazi. The Jewish appetising shops of the Lower East Side sold smoked and cured fish, and the plate that came out of them, split bagel, cream cheese, sliced lox, red onion, tomato, and a scattering of capers, became one of the most recognisable food images the United States has produced. The capers are doing real work: cold cured salmon is fatty and sweetish, and something salt and sharp is needed against it. Russ & Daughters has been selling the combination on Houston Street since 1914.
The two traditions never merged and never had to. They simply meant that by the middle of the twentieth century a New Yorker met capers in two entirely unrelated contexts and thought nothing of either.
