Sarepta mustard from the Volga, fierce with brown seed and finished with its own oil
Origin: Sarepta, Volgograd, Russia
From the journey of Mustard.
The fiercest table mustard in Europe comes from a Moravian missionary colony on the Volga steppe, and it exists because somebody was looking for cooking oil. Sarepta, south of what is now Volgograd, was founded in 1765 by the Moravian Brethren under a charter from Catherine the Great. The steppe around it grew a wild brown mustard, and from about 1801 a colonist named Konrad Neitz began pressing its seed for oil and grinding what was left for the table. The strain became known as Brassica juncea var. sareptana, Sarepta mustard, and within a few decades it was supplying the whole empire; by the later nineteenth century Sarepta oil was on the imperial table and the mill was among the largest in Russia. Russian mustard is startling to anyone expecting Dijon. It is ground from high-sinigrin brown seed and made with boiling water rather than cold, which sounds like an error and is in fact a deliberate choice: it scalds off some of the bitterness of the coarse husk, and enough pungency survives to be more than sufficient. Vinegar, a little sugar, and characteristically a spoonful of mustard oil follow. The oil is the signature and is what separates it from a German or English mustard; it adds body and a second, slower burn on top of the first. It is eaten in quantities that alarm visitors: smeared thickly on black bread with salo, spooned beside kholodets, the set meat aspic of a Russian holiday table, alongside sausage and boiled potatoes, and worked into the dressing of a herring salad. There is also a durable household use for it that has nothing to do with eating. Spread on the chest or stirred into a footbath for a cold, it is the medieval mustard plaster surviving intact as a domestic remedy, and most Russians of a certain age were subjected to it as children.
It keeps for about a month refrigerated in a tightly sealed jar and loses heat steadily after the first fortnight, which is normal and is why Russian households make it in small batches. Mustard oil gives the authentic character and is sold by Indian and Eastern European grocers. Where it is labelled for external use only, sunflower oil is the usual domestic substitute and the mustard is still very good. The classic accompaniments are kholodets, boiled or smoked sausage, salo on black bread, boiled potatoes with dill, and jellied tongue. A teaspoon whisked into the oil and vinegar for a herring salad is standard. For a milder version, use half brown and half yellow mustard powder and increase the sugar to a tablespoon. This is closer to the Ukrainian style and considerably easier for the uninitiated.
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