Caper buds. Capers are a distinctive ingredient in Italian cuisine, especially in Sicilian, Aeolian and southern Italian cooking. They are commonly used in salads, pasta salads, meat dishes, and pasta sauces. Examples of uses in Italian cuisine are chicken piccata and "spaghetti alla puttanesca". Capers are known for being one of the ingredients of tartar sauce. They are often served with cold smoked salmon or cured salmon dishes (especially lox and cream cheese). Capers and caper berries are sometimes substituted for olives to garnish a martini. Capers are categorized and sold by their size, defined as follows, with the smallest sizes
Shiso being pickled in their vats. The red pigment is identified as the Perilla anthocyanin, "shisonin". The mature red leaves make undesirable raw salad leaves, but germinated sprouts, or , have been long used as garnish to accent a Japanese dish, such as a plate of sashimi. The tiny pellets of flower-buds ("ho-jiso") and seed pods (fruits) can be scraped off using the chopstick or fingers and mixed into the soy sauce dip to add the distinct spicy flavor, especially to flavor fish. Bunches of green shiso-leaves packaged in styrofoam trays can be found on supermarket shelves in Japan and Japanese