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Prepared Mustard
C. D. Adams.
Two tablespoons mustard, one teaspoon sugar, one-half teaspoon salt, boiling water enough to mix it; when cold, add one tablespoon salad oil and vinegar enough to thin it. This will keep a week or two.
A small-batch table mustard of the kind every household mixed for itself before jarred mustard was a supermarket staple. It comes together in two minutes, but the temperature of the water decides how the finished condiment tastes.
- The hinge: boiling waterMustard's heat comes from an enzyme reaction that needs cool liquid; boiling water deactivates it, so this recipe gives a mild, mellow mustard rather than a sinus-clearing one. If you want it sharp, mix with cold water instead and let it stand ten minutes before adding anything else.
- "Mustard" means dry powderMixed with boiling water, the word here must mean ground mustard flour — Colman's or a comparable yellow mustard powder. Do not substitute prepared mustard from a jar, and note that whole seed will not work here.
- Salad oilPeriod shorthand for a neutral, mild table oil, usually olive or cottonseed. Any mild olive oil or a neutral vegetable oil does the job; its purpose is body and gloss, not flavour.
- Vinegar "enough to thin it"Start with about a tablespoon of cider or white wine vinegar and add more a teaspoon at a time. Two tablespoons of powder will take roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of liquid in total before it reaches spreading consistency.
- YieldAround a quarter cup — enough for a few meals, which is the point of a recipe designed to be remade often.
- Rest before servingFreshly mixed mustard tastes raw and bitter. Give it an hour, ideally overnight, for the acid and oil to round it out.
- Keeping"A week or two" assumed a cool larder. Keep it covered in the refrigerator, where the vinegar and mustard oils will hold it comfortably for two to three weeks; discard if it darkens badly or smells flat, since the aroma fades long before anything else goes wrong.
Prepared mustard was a home job for most of the nineteenth century. Mustard came into the kitchen as a powder — the milling of seed into fine mustard flour was an English industry from the eighteenth century onward — and the powder itself was the object of the era's documented adulteration scandals, padded with turmeric, wheat flour or worse. Mixing your own by the spoonful, as C. D. Adams does here, guaranteed freshness, and the small yield is deliberate: mustard's pungency is volatile and begins fading within days of mixing. That this appears in The Home Cook Book, a Chicago charity compilation of contributed household recipes, is typical of the genre — such books collected the small everyday preparations that a cook was assumed to make constantly.