Skip to main content
Sauce

Mustard the Common Wat

A thick mustard sauce made with mustard flour, salt, boiling water, and optional powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Mustard the Common Wat

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix mustard flour and coarse sea salt in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add boiling water while stirring until it reaches a thick batter consistency.

  3. If desired, mix in powdered sugar for added sweetness.

  4. Let the mixture cool before transferring it to a mustard container.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  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 flour
Ground mustard seed that forms the body of the sauce and gives it its sharp pungent flavor.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharpness of the mustard.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling water. Mustard flavor develops from enzymes that release pungent compounds when the ground seed is mixed with water. Hot water rather than cold can make the flavor harsher, so add it gradually while stirring to reach an even, thick batter.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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.

More mustard sauce recipes

Tomato 24Horseradish 8 See all 119 →

You might also like

Mixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes