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Mustard Plaster

Monitor skin closely to avoid blisters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and rye share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mustard Plaster

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix mustard flour and rye flour together on a plate.

  2. Add cold water gradually to form a soft paste.

  3. Spread the mixture evenly over a piece of muslin.

  4. Place a piece of gauze over the plaster to prevent it from sticking to the skin.

  5. For children, use half the amount of mustard flour to reduce strength.

  6. Check the skin every few minutes and remove the plaster if redness occurs.

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 + ryetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + ryetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

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

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