Nora Ephron (may you rest in peace), you lied to me.
I was young and learning to cook, and in your 1983 novel Heartburn, you completely misled me about capers.
Long before I knew I was going to be a food writer, Ephron’s heroine, Rachel Samstat, was a cookbook writer who recounts an assignment to develop recipes using capers:
“It was weeks of tossing capers into just about everything but milkshakes before I came to terms with the fact that nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.”
I was young and impressionable. I believed her.