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Sauce

Mustard in a Minute

A quick mustard sauce made by mixing mustard flour with milk, salt, and sugar until smooth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and mustard 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 in a Minute

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the mustard flour with the milk gradually in a mortar.

  2. Add the salt and sugar, and rub them together until smooth.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Mustard flour
Provides the sharp, pungent flavour and, once mixed with liquid, the body of the sauce.
Milk
Hydrates the mustard flour and gives the sauce a creamy, smooth texture.
Sugar
Softens the sharp bite of the mustard.

The step that matters

Mixing the mustard flour with the milk gradually. Adding the liquid slowly lets each particle of mustard flour hydrate evenly, which prevents lumps and gives a smooth sauce. Dumping in all the milk at once tends to leave dry clumps that are hard to work out.

Swap the mustard

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

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

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

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