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Mustard Sauce

A sauce made from raw mustard, milk, salt, vinegar, mustard flour, baked flour, butter, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Mustard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mustard base

  1. In a bowl, mix raw mustard with milk and salt. Add more milk and vinegar.

  2. Let it curdle until thick.

Make the cooked sauce

  1. For the second version, combine mustard flour and baked flour in a saucepan. Add butter and boiling water.

  2. Cook until thick. Finish with vinegar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Raw mustard
Provides the sharp, pungent mustard flavor that defines the sauce.
Milk
Supplies the liquid base that the sauce thickens from.
Baked flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and water.
Mustard flour
Adds mustard flavor and some thickening power to the cooked version.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, smoothing the texture of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook until thick. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid long enough to swell and gelatinize. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and floury-tasting, while overcooking can make it stiff, so watch for the sauce to thicken and stop there.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, vinegar, flour, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, vinegar, flour, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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