Home › The Principles of Cookery › Indian Mustard
Indian Mustard
To a mixture of mustard and flour in equal quantities, rubbed to a smooth stiff paste with boiling water, add a little salt, and reduce the thickness as follows. Boil down four shallots, shredded finely, with a wine-glass each of vinegar and mushroom ketchup, and half a glass of anchovy sauce. In ten minutes pour these ingredients, boiling hot, into the basin over the mustard and flour mixture, stirring until it is smooth and of the proper consistency. Put a shallot, bruised, into each bottle when stored. Indian mustard will keep for some time, and is excellent as a breakfast relish. Time, ten minutes to boil. Sufficient for a quarter of a pound of mustard.
A bottled mustard relish rather than a table mustard mixed fresh. Two things matter: the liquid goes in boiling, which changes the flavour permanently, and the finished jar is not shelf-stable in the modern sense.
- Boiling liquid is the hingeMustard's heat comes from an enzyme reaction that only happens in cool liquid, and boiling water destroys it. Everything here is added scalding hot on purpose, so the result is a savoury, mellow, anchovy-and-shallot relish rather than a sharp mustard. If you want it fierce, this is the wrong recipe.
- "Mustard" means the powderA quarter of a pound (4 oz, about 1 cup) of dry mustard flour, not prepared paste from a jar. English mustard powder is the closest match.
- Equal quantities of flourSo 4 oz plain flour to the 4 oz mustard. The flour acts as a bulker and thickener; flour was commonly used to extend mustard at this date, and it blunts the heat further.
- A wine-glassVictorian recipe books generally reckon a wine-glass at about 2 fl oz (a quarter of a cup). So roughly 1/4 cup each vinegar and mushroom ketchup, and about 2 tablespoons anchovy sauce.
- Mushroom ketchup and anchovy sauceMushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold in Britain; a mushroom soy or a strong mushroom stock reduced with a little soy stands in. Anchovy sauce is the bottled thin sauce, not anchovy paste and not fish sauce tha spoonful of Worcestershire plus mashed anchovy fillet is nearer the mark.
- ConsistencyPour the hot liquid in gradually and stop when it drops thickly from the spoon. It stiffens noticeably once cold, so leave it looser than you want it.
- The bruised shallot in the bottleMeant as a slow flavouring for a jar kept in a cool larder. Raw allium sitting in a paste is not something to leave at room temperature for weeks; either omit it or keep the jar refrigerated and use it within a month.
- Yield and useA sizeable quantity of finished relish from 4 oz each of mustard and flour, probably more than a modern kitchen wants; consider quartering the recipe. The recipe recommends it simply as a breakfast relish.
Anglo-Indian condiments were a familiar feature of Victorian British breakfast tables, and "Indian" on a nineteenth-century label often signalled nothing more precise than dark, salty and pungent -- the register of chutney, mango relish and bottled sauce associated with the subcontinent. The name here is not botanical: the mustard called for is ordinary English mustard flour, whatever the seed. What makes the mixture read as "Indian" is the compounding of a plain mustard with a reduction of shallot, vinegar, mushroom ketchup and anchovy sauce, ingredients that also turn up in commercial store sauces of the period.