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Good Common Mustard

A simple mustard made by mixing mustard flour with boiling water and salt, then rubbing until smooth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,066 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Good Common Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mustard

  1. Gradually mix the best mustard-flour with boiling water.

  2. Add ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt.

  3. Rub the mixture for a long time until it is perfectly smooth.

  4. Make only a small amount at a time for best results.

Store

  1. Store in a pot with a ground stopper.

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 + 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

What each ingredient does

Mustard flour
Provides the pungent flavour and the bulk that thickens into a paste when mixed with water.
Boiling water
Hydrates the mustard flour so it forms a paste, and its heat helps develop the sharp flavour.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture until perfectly smooth. Thorough rubbing breaks up lumps so the paste becomes uniformly smooth and creamy. Mustard flavour develops over time after mixing, so the paste's pungency changes as it rests.

“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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