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Mustard, How to Mix
INGREDIENTS. - Mustard, salt and water.
Mustard should be mixed with water that has been boiled and allowed to cool; hot water destroys its essential properties, and raw cold water might cause it to ferment. Put the mustard into a cup with a small pinch of salt, and mix with it very gradually sufficient boiled water to make it drop from the spoon without being watery.
Stir and mix well, and rub the lumps well down with the back of Spoon, as well-mixed mustard should be perfectly free from these. The mustardpot should not be more than half-full, or rather less if it will not be used for a day or two, as it is so much better when it is freshly mixed. a MUSTARD.
Note. One of the best brands of mustard is Champion's.
Mustard, Indian. (An excellent Relish to any Cold Meat.) INGREDIENTS. -lb. of Colman's mustard, lb. of flour, 1/2 oz. of salt, 4 shalots, 4 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, 4 tablespoonfuls of ketchup, 1/4 bottle of anchovy sauce.
Put the mustard, flour and salt into a basin, and make them into a stiff paste with boiling water. Boil the shalots with the vinegar, ketchup and anchovy sauce for 10 minutes, and pour the whole, boiling, over the mixture in the basin; stir well and reduce it to a proper thickness; SEASONABLE. - Meadow mushrooms in put it into a bottle, with a bruised shalotat September and October.
Mushrooms, Stewed in Gravy.
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.- 1 pint of mushroom-buttons, 1 pint of brown gravy, 1/4 teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, cayenne and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Make a pint of brown gravy, cut nearly all the stalks away from the mushrooms the bottom and store away for use. This makes an excellent relish and, if properly prepared, will keep for years.
Two things here: the household routine for mixing dry mustard powder at the table, and a keeping mustard flavoured with shallot, ketchup and anchovy. The first is a matter of technique, the second of proportions.
- Cooled boiled water is the hingeMustard's heat comes from an enzyme reaction between myrosinase and the glucosinolates in the seed, which needs water and a few minutes to develop. Boiling water denatures the enzyme and you get a bland, bitter paste; the instruction is sound chemistry, not superstition.
- Let it stand, then use itMixed mustard develops its pungency within roughly ten minutes of wetting and loses it over the following hours, which is why the book tells you to keep the pot no more than half full. Mix what will be eaten at one meal.
- Mustard powder todayColman's is still sold and behaves as described. Any plain yellow or English mustard flour will work; do not substitute a prepared jarred mustard, which is already hydrated and vinegared.
- The Indian mustard quantitiesThe weights of mustard and flour have not survived intact in this text, so the ratio cannot be given honestly. The recipe reads as roughly equal parts mustard powder and flour by weight, but treat that as an inference rather than the original figure.
- ShalotsShallots. Four of them, boiled in the vinegar mixture; a bruised shallot goes into the bottle as flavouring.
- Ketchup here is not tomatoIn Beeton's usage ketchup without qualification generally means mushroom ketchup, a thin dark salty liquid still sold by British grocers. Walnut ketchup is the nearest alternative; tomato ketchup will make the relish sweet and thick.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled thin brown sauce of anchovy, vinegar and spice, close to a very salty Worcestershire. A quarter of a modern bottle is roughly 3-4 tablespoons; anchovy paste thinned with vinegar substitutes reasonably.
- Keeping itThe vinegar, salt and mustard make this a hostile medium for spoilage organisms, but the claim that it will keep for years assumes a cold larder and constant use. Bottle it, refrigerate, and judge it by smell after a few months rather than trusting the promise.
Table mustard in Victorian Britain was almost always sold as a dry flour and mixed fresh in the house, a trade that Jeremiah Colman built into a national business from his Norwich mills after 1814; the finely milled powder was blended from brown and white seed with a little wheat flour and turmeric. That is why a book of this period gives half a page to something a modern cook buys in a jar - mixing the pot was a daily kitchen task, and doing it badly, with lumps or hot water, was a visible failure at the table. The second recipe belongs to the long Victorian appetite for pungent bottled relishes flavoured with anchovy and mushroom ketchup, sauces carrying the label "Indian" more as a promise of heat and exoticism than as any record of Indian cookery.