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Piquant Mustard Sauce
Peel and slice an onion, put it in a saucepan, add two or three thinly-sliced cloves of garlic, two bay leaves, one teaspoonful of crushed peppercorns, a few cloves, a little tarragon and a pint of the best vinegar; season with salt and boil the whole together for ten or fifteen minutes. Leave the vinegar until cold, keeping the lid on the saucepan; then stir in sufficient mustard to make a stiff paste and pour the mixture into small jars, which should be tightly corked and tied down with paper. Mustard prepared in this way may be kept for some time.
A vinegar-infusion mustard of the French type, thickened with dry mustard flour rather than whole seed. The recipe is sound; the two things it leaves unsaid are how much mustard "sufficient" is and why the vinegar must be cold.
- Add the mustard to cold vinegarAdd the mustard to cold vinegar. Mustard's pungency comes from an enzyme reaction that begins when the ground seed meets liquid; hot liquid deactivates the enzyme and leaves a duller, merely bitter paste. The recipe does not say why it wants the vinegar cold, but the chemistry supports the instruction.
- "Sufficient mustard"Dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Something on the order of 8 to 12 oz of powder per pint of strained vinegar should give a stiff paste; work it in a little at a time and judge by consistency, remembering that the powder goes on absorbing liquid as it stands.
- Strain firstOscar does not say so, but the onion, garlic, bay and cloves are best strained out before the mustard goes in; spice left in the jar will go on extracting.
- A pint of vinegar16 fl oz. A good white wine vinegar suits this best; malt or cider vinegar will dominate the aromatics.
- Boiling the vinegarTen to fifteen minutes; a steady simmer is enough. Boiling hard drives off both the vinegar and the volatile aromatics, and the kitchen will be unpleasant either way. The lid the recipe calls for is for the cooling, not the boiling.
- Corks and paperPeriod sealing. Use small jars with proper lids and keep them refrigerated. The vinegar makes this a high-acid preserve, so it keeps for months, but the aroma fades long before the mustard spoils.
- Let it restFreshly mixed mustard is aggressively bitter for the first day or two. Give it three or four days in the cold before judging the seasoning.
- YieldSomething over two cups of stiff paste, depending on how much powder is worked in.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), was compiling for a readership that still expected a hotel kitchen to make its own condiments rather than buy them. Mustard flour was the ordinary commercial form by the 1890s, sold in tins by firms in England and America, and a cook who bought the powder could produce whatever style of mustard the house preferred: water for hot English, verjuice or wine for the softer French sorts, and vinegar boiled with aromatics for a keeping mustard of the kind described here. The onion, garlic, bay, clove and tarragon infusion places it firmly in the French tradition associated with Dijon and Bordeaux, where the character of the mustard comes as much from the liquid as from the seed.