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Mustard
2 teaspoons mustard 1 teaspoon Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soft butter 1 teaspoon sugar 1 tablespoon vinegar 1/2 cup boiling water Mix in the order given, in a granite sauce-pan, add water and cook till it thickens and is smooth.
A small hot mustard sauce for boiled or baked fish, thickened with a teaspoon of flour rather than egg. It comes together in about three minutes and needs watching only at the end.
- "Mustard" means dry powder"Mustard" almost certainly means dry mustard powder here, not a jarred prepared mustard — the recipe supplies its own vinegar and salt, which a prepared mustard would already contain and so would alter the balance.
- Granite saucepanGranite ware is speckled enamel over steel — the period's answer to a non-reactive pan. Any stainless or enamelled pan does the same job; the point is to keep the vinegar off bare cast iron or unlined copper.
- Mix dry before wetThe order given matters. Rub the mustard, flour, salt and sugar together with the butter and vinegar into a smooth paste first, then pour on the boiling water. Adding water to loose flour gives lumps that no amount of stirring will fix.
- Cook the flour out"Till it thickens" is not quite enough. Let it bubble gently for a minute or two after it thickens or the sauce keeps a raw, pasty taste from the flour.
- Heat and timeMustard's pungency develops when the powder is moistened with cool liquid and is largely lost to prolonged heat, so this sauce will be mild and rounded; slaking the mustard powder in a little cool liquid for ten minutes before it goes near the pan will give a sharper result.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt in this small a quantity of sauce is heavily seasoned by current standards. Half that is a safer starting point, with more added at the end.
- Yield and servingA little over half a cup. The recipe gives no serving suggestion; a sauce of this kind is meant to be spooned over hot food at once, and may need thinning with a spoonful of hot water if it stands and stiffens.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was one of the milling industry's promotional cookbooks — Washburn-Crosby, later General Mills, put its brand name into the ingredient list of recipes that used flour, including a teaspoon of it here. The sauce itself is older than the book, and is often said to have English antecedents: mustard with boiled or salted fish is a pairing generally traced through British cookery well before the nineteenth century, mustard's heat serving the same purpose against oily or plainly cooked fish that horseradish serves against beef. What arguably marks this version as American and of its date is the flour-thickened, water-based body rather than a butter or cream base, and the granite saucepan, a cheap enamelware that was an accepted vessel for anything acidic.