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Preserve

Keeping Mustard

A preserved mustard condiment made with salt, boiling water, horseradish, and mustard flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Keeping Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brine

  1. Dissolve salt in boiling water.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the scraped horseradish.

  3. Cover the jar tightly and let it stand for 24 hours.

Make and bottle the mixture

  1. Strain the mixture and gradually mix it with flour of mustard.

  2. Beat the mixture well until it reaches the desired thickness.

  3. Transfer to wide-mouthed bottles and cork them tightly.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + mustardtop 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

Flour of mustard
Provides the main mustard flavour and, mixed into the liquid, thickens the preparation.
Scraped horseradish
Adds pungent aroma and heat that infuse into the hot liquid during standing.
Salt
Acts as a preservative, helping to keep the mixture stable during storage.

The step that matters

Beating to the desired thickness. Mustard flour thickens as it hydrates and its pungency develops over time. Beating thoroughly distributes the flour evenly so no dry lumps remain, and stopping at the right point controls the final consistency.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Beetrootfits about as well
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Turnipfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, flour. 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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