Home › Sauces for Meat and Vegetables › Mustard Sauce
Mustard Sauce
1 tablespoon vinegar 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon French mus- ½ teaspoon sugar tard few grains cayenne 1 cup stock Melt butter; add flour, mustard, salt, sugar and cayenne. When well blended, add stock, simmer twenty minutes, add vinegar, and serve.
A plain flour-thickened velouté sharpened with mustard and vinegar, of the kind served with boiled beef, tongue or ham. The printed ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column layout, so read it carefully before starting.
- The missing butterThe method begins "melt butter" but no butter appears in the surviving ingredient list — it has dropped out of the column. Period sauces of this kind commonly use equal measures of butter and flour, so for 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup stock, 2 tablespoons butter is a reasonable reconstruction.
- Reading the columnsThe list is a single set of ingredients split across two columns: 1 tablespoon vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon sugar, 1 cup stock, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 tablespoon French mustard, a few grains cayenne. "Few grains" means a pinch, roughly 1/16 teaspoon.
- French mustardNot the bright yellow American condiment. In books of this period it meant a prepared, smooth mustard in the French style rather than dry English mustard powder; Dijon is a fair modern stand-in.
- Blooming the mustard in fatCooking prepared mustard into the roux tames its raw bite and blends it smoothly, but keep the heat low — scorched flour will taste bitter and the sauce is too small in volume to hide it.
- The twenty-minute simmerThis is not padding. A cup of thin stock over 2 tablespoons flour needs the long, gentle cook to lose its pasty taste and reduce to coating consistency. Stir often and expect to top up with a spoonful of stock if it tightens too far.
- Vinegar lastThe acid goes in off the heat, or nearly so. Added early it thins the starch bond and cooks off the sharpness that the sauce exists to deliver.
- Stock qualityWith so few ingredients the stock is the sauce. Use a well-seasoned beef or veal stock; a bouillon cube will read as salt and little else, in which case cut the added teaspoon of salt back and taste at the end.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for four to six servings alongside boiled or braised meat.
Mustard sauce belongs to the long line of British and American "made sauces" built on a butter-and-flour roux loosened with stock — the family that French cookery names velouté. Mustard was the classic partner to boiled beef, salt pork, tongue and mackerel, its acid and heat cutting the fat of slow-simmered meat. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, is remembered mainly for its chocolate recipes, since Lowney's was a chocolate manufacturer, but it was built out as a full general manual — hence a straightforward sauce chapter of this kind sitting a few pages from the fudge. The garbled ingredient list here is most likely an artifact of the way such books were set: compositors set ingredients in two narrow columns, and later reprints and digital transcriptions may have read them straight across.