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Made Mustard
Pour a very little boiling water over three tablespoons of mustard; add one saltspoon of salt, a tablespoon of olive oil, stirred slowly in, and one teaspoon of sugar; add the yolk of an egg, beaten well, and pour in vinegar to taste. It is best eaten next day.
This is a table mustard mixed from dry powder, in the enriched style that shades toward mayonnaise. The raw yolk is the problem: nothing in the method brings the egg to a safe temperature, and the mixture is deliberately held a day before eating.
- Raw egg, held overnightThe yolk goes in beaten and uncooked, and the finished mustard is set aside until the next day. Salmonella in a raw yolk is the specific risk, and the recipe gives no instruction to keep the mixture cold while it stands.
- The acid is unmeasuredVinegar is added "to taste," so the finished pH is unknown. Acidity is what makes an egg-bearing sauce reasonably stable, and a recipe that leaves it to the tongue cannot be relied on to reach the level that matters. A current prepared-mustard or mayonnaise recipe with measured acid should be used instead.
- No preservation step at allThere is no heating, no salt cure worth the name (one saltspoon), and no instruction about cold storage, which in the 1870s would have meant a cellar or an icebox rather than a refrigerator. The keeping qualities the recipe implies are not there.
- SaltspoonFor reading the original: a saltspoon is the smallest spoon in a Victorian caster set, roughly a quarter teaspoon.
- "Mustard" means the dry powderNineteenth-century recipes calling for tablespoons of mustard mean milled mustard flour, sold in tins, not the wet condiment in a jar. Three tablespoons of powder is a fierce quantity, which is why the oil, sugar and yolk are there to round it.
- Why it rests a dayThe instruction to eat it the next day is not a safety measure: freshly wetted mustard flour is harsh and raw-tasting, and it is generally held to mellow and settle over some hours.
"Made mustard" was the standard English phrase for mustard mixed up from powder, as against the seed or the flour itself, and it survived in cookbooks long after commercially bottled mustards were common. The trade in fine-milled mustard flour is generally traced to eighteenth-century Durham, and by the time The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s a tin of yellow powder was a common kitchen stock, mixed fresh in a small pot for the table because wetted mustard loses its bite within days. Recipes like this one, with oil, sugar and egg yolk beaten in, belong to a genteel strand that softened the powder into something closer to a salad sauce. The Home Cook Book was a subscription-published community cookbook of the sort assembled from contributed recipes and arranged loosely.