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Prepared Mustard
1 egg 1 C vinegar 3 T dry mustard 1 T sugar Mix sugar and mustard Add the egg and beat until very smooth. Gradually add vinegar, stirring until smooth. Put in double boiler and cook until it thickens nicely. Very good.
Mrs. M. R. Miller.
A cooked egg-and-vinegar mustard of the kind kept in a jar for ham sandwiches and cold meat. The whole thing hinges on treating it as a custard rather than a sauce.
- The abbreviationsC is a cup, T a tablespoon. So: 1 cup vinegar, 3 tablespoons dry mustard, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 egg.
- YieldRoughly a cup, about what a half-pint jar holds.
- Dry mustardThis means plain powdered mustard flour, Colman's or similar, with nothing added. Do not substitute prepared mustard from a jar or a seeded whole-grain mustard.
- Treat it as a custardEgg thickens between roughly 160 and 180F and scrambles above that. Keep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer, never boiling, and stir constantly. Pulled at the right point it coats a spoon; ten seconds too long and it goes grainy.
- VinegarThe recipe does not specify a type; cider vinegar is the likely household default. Modern table vinegar is about 5 percent acidity, though older and homemade vinegars varied. The vinegar is doing double duty as flavor and as a preservative, so do not cut it with water.
- Heat and pungencyThe sinus-clearing heat of mustard comes from an enzyme reaction that heat destroys, so cooking gives a mellower, more sour result than the same powder mixed cold. Expect tang rather than sharpness.
- RestingFreshly made it tastes raw and bitter. Two or three days in the refrigerator rounds it out considerably.
- StorageBecause of the egg this is not a shelf-stable condiment despite the vinegar. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and use it within two weeks.
Homemade prepared mustard was a standard item in church and community cookbooks well into the twentieth century, and the egg-thickened version — closer to what would now be sold as a mustard sauce or salad mustard — was common in American households alongside the smooth French-style paste. Dry mustard flour kept well in the pantry, so a cook could produce a jar of condiment from three shelf staples and an egg whenever the ham was cut. The style survives commercially in the sweet-sour "salad dressing" mustards of the Midwest, and the same formula, with more sugar, becomes the hot-mustard sauce still served with ham loaf and Pennsylvania Dutch cold meats.