Colman's-style mustard flour mixed with cold water and left ten minutes, and nothing else
Origin: Norwich & Durham, England
From the journey of Mustard.
English mustard is the plainest preparation in this entry and the one that most rewards knowing the chemistry, because it is nothing but powder and cold water and the ten minutes in between. The English tradition began as a ball. Mustard flour was mixed with horseradish and a little vinegar, dried hard, and sold to be crumbled into liquid at the table; Tewkesbury made the best, and they were sufficiently well known that Shakespeare uses them as an insult, Falstaff remarking that Poins has a wit as thick as Tewkesbury mustard. The step that produced the modern article was milling. A Mrs Clements of Durham is credited, around 1720, with working out how to grind and sift mustard seed into a fine flour in the way that wheat was milled, separating out the husk, and Durham mustard was the result. The name that stuck arrived in 1814, when Jeremiah Colman took a mill outside Norwich and blended Brassica juncea for heat with Sinapis alba for body, selling it as a yellow powder in a tin. It is still sold as a powder as often as a paste, and the powder is the better buy, because made mustard begins losing its pungency the moment it is mixed. The method has three rules and all three follow from the same fact. Mustard seed holds a compound and an enzyme in separate cells, and the heat is only created when the two meet in water. So: use cold water, because heat destroys the enzyme; wait ten minutes, because the reaction is not instant; and add no vinegar, because acid halts the reaction and locks in bitterness. Almost every complaint about weak or bitter homemade mustard comes from breaking one of the three. Made properly it is ferocious, and it is meant to be used by the quarter-teaspoon.
Adding vinegar is what commercial jarred mustard does, and it is done for shelf life rather than for flavour: acid arrests the reaction and stabilises what is left. Add a teaspoon at the end if you want the mustard to keep for a week, and accept that it will be less fierce. The standard proportions are equal volumes of powder and water. More water gives a looser mustard and no more heat. Use it with roast beef, ham, sausages, pork pies, and strong cheddar; whisk a teaspoon into a cheese sauce or a Welsh rarebit; add a scant quarter-teaspoon to a vinaigrette, where it emulsifies as well as sharpens; and stir it into gravy for roast beef. A classic Victorian variation replaces the water with cold flat beer or with milk, both of which soften it. Mixing with cider is a West Country habit and is very good with ham.
Mapping Culinary History
To explore — select an ingredient below.
To explore — select an ingredient below · click any location dot on the map for recipes and stories · browse the information panel on the right · trace the full journey on the timeline.
Journey Point Map Key