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Sauce

Prepared Mustard

A mustard sauce made by mixing mustard, sugar, salt, water, oil, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Prepared Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix mustard, sugar, salt, and enough boiling water to create a paste.

  2. Let it cool, then add salad oil and vinegar to thin it.

  3. Store in a sealed container; it will keep for a week or two.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Mustard + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Mustard
Provides the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the sauce.
Salad oil
Adds fat and smoothness, mellowing the sauce's sharpness and giving it body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and thins the paste into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Let it cool before adding oil and vinegar. Boiling water makes the paste hot, and adding oil and vinegar while it is still hot can change the flavour and texture of the mustard. Cooling first lets the paste settle before it is thinned.

“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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