Violet Mustard

So… what’s mustard?

The recipe is pretty simple – you can even make it at home. You grind up mustard seeds, traditionally with a mortar and pestle, but you can use a spice grinder. Once the seeds are ground as fine as you want them, you add liquid. Usually that’s water or vinegar, but you could also use ale or fruit juice. Next add other seasonings. Salt is a good place to start, but you can use anything from herbs to honey. Mix it all together and you’ve got mustard.

What makes some mustards hot?

First, there’s a bit of natural chemistry at work. Mustard comes from the brassica family of plants and, as a defense, these plants developed a compound called sinigrin that turns into mustard oil. It’s that oil that feels like a punch in the nose. Mustard seeds come in white, brown, and black and get hotter as they get darker so black mustard seeds have the most sinigrin.

Second, mustard makers amplify the natural chemistry with recipes that kick up its heat. Warming mustard actually lessens the reaction, so the hottest mustards are made with very cold water. Adding vinegar can halt the reaction and maintain heat so a dash of vinegar is always found in the hottest mustards. Mustards mellow over time so the hottest are usually fresher. Mustards will keep pretty much indefinitely even at room temperature, but they’ll retain more of their pungency when refrigerated.

What’s the deal with Dijon?

Mustard made in the French town of Dijon has a long history of being considered some of the best; it was the mustard of choice for French royalty in the 14th century. There have been laws regulating how it’s made since 1407. These days, the laws stipulate that Dijon mustard must be made with brown or black mustard seed, the darker varieties, making it pungent. There’s a long tradition of using verjuice – the very tart juice of unripe grapes from nearby vineyards – to make Dijon mustard, and the acid helps to balance out the heat. The result is generally a mustard that’s smooth but packs a serious punch.

How did American mustard get so yellow?

A little over a hundred years ago Americans barely used mustard – it was sold mostly as a powder and it was hot. In 1904, Robert French launched a mild “cream salad mustard” that was spreadable and sales took off after it hit a hot dog at the St. Louis’s World Fair. French’s mustard is still a huge seller. Robert colored it yellow with turmeric to set it apart. Competitors copied the look and, ever since, the go-to American mustard has remained bright yellow and fairly bland (thanks to using only mild white mustard seeds). There’s more flavorful yellow mustard to be found out there; Raye’s in Maine makes an exceptional classic yellow mustard that I’ve always got in my fridge.

In French there’s a saying: “se croire le premier moutardier du pape.” Roughly translated, it means, “he thinks he’s the pope’s mustard maker.” It describes someone who’s perhaps a bit too proud of himself. The story goes that Pope John XXII got a hankering for the unique purple mustard of his hometown in southwestern France, so he called up his nephew (or sent him a letter, or a papal carrier pigeon—however popes got in touch with their nephews 650 years ago) and invited him to the papal palace to be his own personal mustard maker. I wonder if he just liked purple for its royal connotations, or if he couldn’t bear meals without his hometown mustard?

Despite the papal seal of approval, that purple mustard never really made it big.

When Elie-Arnaud Denoix started making mustard at his family’s cognac distillery in the Périgord region of in southwestern France, the purple mustard of his childhood was all but extinct. He decided to revive it, and after a year of making batch after batch of it he landed on a recipe that he thought tasted like the traditional product. To verify his tastebuds’ intuition, he took it to a nearby village and gave it to as many of the older townsfolk as he could, the ones who grew up eating it. He asked them if it was the mustard they remembered. Half of them told him it was exactly right; half of them said it was completely wrong. Elie counted that as success and started production.

Denoix’s violet mustard is purple because it’s half grape juice.

More specifically, grape must: freshly pressed juice that includes stuff like skins, seeds, and stems. Using grape must is a very old way to make mustard. The word “mustard” actually derives from the Latin mustum, for grape must, and ardens , for burning, so I’d bet the mustard eaten in ancient Rome looked a lot like violet mustard. By 1407 mustard makers in Dijon, France had switched from using must to vinegar and most of the mustard world followed suit. In Périgord vinegar was more precious as medicine than as food, so they kept using must.

Elie usually uses local grapes for the must, and he looks for ones with a lot of color and sugar. After the juice is pressed it’s heated to evaporate the water and concentrate the flavor. Then he adds the must to a blend of two mustard seeds: mostly there are a lot of milder yellow seeds, but he also includes a small amount of more pungent black seeds. The mix is ground very lightly in a stone mill, leaving lots of the seeds intact and making the mustard a bit crunchy.

Mustard is at its spiciest about 15 minutes after it’s mixed together, but most of us are unlikely to ever try it that fresh unless we make our own. From there it gets mellower with time. Since the violet mustard is meant to be sweet and mellow, Elie ages each 200-pound batch for eight weeks before jarring it. The result is a remarkably soft and sweet mustard with only the barest whisper of heat.

By the way, there are no violets—as in the flowers—in this mustard, as I assumed when I first heard about it. The “violet” is in the name is because violet is the French word for purple.

Violet mustard is really, really good with cheese.

I especially love it paired with the Manchester made by Zingerman’s Creamery—together they’re earthy, tangy, creamy and crunchy from the caviar pop you get from biting down on the whole mustard seeds. (We sell those two paired together in their own gift box.) Elie really likes violet mustard with blue cheese . He also likes it with boudin sausage and cooked apples, a traditional way to serve violet mustard in Périgord. Blended with a bit of balsamic it also makes an incredible sauce for a steak—and if the current pope had his own personal violet mustard maker, I’d bet that, given his Argentinian roots, that’s how he’d want it served.