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Aromatic Mustard
4 tablespoonfuls ground mustard. 1 tablespoonful flour. 1 tablespoonful sugar. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1 teaspoonful black pepper. 1 teaspoonful cloves. 1 teaspoonful cinnamon.
Mix smoothly with boiling vinegar, add a little salad oil, and let it stand several hours before using. It will keep any length of time.--Mr. R. H. M.
A dry-spiced table mustard of the type kept mixed in a jar rather than made fresh at each meal. The whole thing takes five minutes; the character comes from how the vinegar is added.
- The hinge: add the vinegar slowlyWhisk the boiling vinegar into the dry mix a spoonful at a time to a smooth paste, then thin to the consistency you want. Dumping it in at once leaves lumps of dry mustard that never disperse.
- What boiling vinegar doesHeat destroys the enzyme that generates mustard's sharp volatile bite, and acid checks it further. This recipe is deliberately mellow and aromatic rather than fierce; cold water would give a hot, short-lived mustard instead.
- Ground mustardPlain mustard powder, unmixed. The recipe does not say which seed or blend. Not prepared mustard, and not the coarse whole-seed kinds.
- SpicesCloves and cinnamon are meant ground. A teaspoon of each against four tablespoons of mustard is assertive; halve them if you want the mustard to read as mustard.
- Salad oilIn this period the term usually meant olive oil or another bland table oil. The recipe says only 'a little'; a tablespoon or so is enough to smooth the texture, and any neutral oil serves.
- VinegarCider vinegar is the likely period choice in a Virginia kitchen. White wine vinegar works; distilled white is harsher.
- RestingThe recipe calls for several hours' standing before use; freshly mixed mustard tastes raw, and the flavours settle as it sits.
- Yield and keepingThe vinegar and oil are unmeasured, so the yield depends on how thin you take it; expect a small jar. "Keep any length of time" was true of an acidic condiment in a cool larder, but with flour and oil in it, refrigerate and use within a month or so; the oil will eventually go stale.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, was assembled from recipes sent in by named and initialed contributors — hence "Mr. R. H. M." — which is why the book reads as a cross-section of what particular Virginia households kept in their pantries rather than a single author's program. A mixed mustard was a standing condiment of the nineteenth-century table, and was commonly made up at home from powder. The "aromatic" style, with clove and cinnamon carried alongside the mustard, echoes an older English tradition of spiced condiments; it sits alongside the spiced ketchups and pickles in the condiment section of this book.