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| Black Mustard Flowers Photo: Aryan Murmu |
The second in my new Jacobean thriller series, Traitor in the Ice, is set in Battle Abbey in 1607, then occupied by the redoubtable dowager and recusant, Lady Magdalene, Viscountess Montague. When her grandson, Anthony Viscount Montague, inherited his estates in 1595, the 22-year-old wrote a rule book for the servants of his household detailing the duties of each officer and servant, from the high steward to the scullery man. While all the other servants were assigned a long list of tasks, I was intrigued to discover that the Sculleryman, had only two duties – to clean and safely store all the pewter and silverware, and ‘to have a single regard to the tempering and making of mustard with good seed and to the well keeping and serving of it.’
Preparing the mustard doesn’t sound like a task that would occupy much of the working day, but when you realise how important mustard was to the Tudor and Jacobean household and the vast quantities they used, it was a key job.
Thomas Tusser (1524-1580) in ‘His points of Good Husbandry’ advises –
Maids, mustard-seed gather, for being too ripe.
And weather it well, ere ye give it a stripe:
Then dress it, and lay it in soller up sweet
lest foistiness make it, for table unmeet.
(Soller – a dry loft or upper room)
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| Black Mustard, Brassica nigra, in seed Councillor's Marsh at Le Verdon-sur-Mer, France Photo: Touam (Herve Agnoux) |
Mustard seed, when ripe scatters from the stem at the slightest touch, so had to be gathered before it was fully ripe. Maver in 1615, says this should be done early in the morning when the dew was still on it. Depending on the quantity to be harvested, the whole plants were usually gathered up in the maid’s skirts or in a sheet carried between two poles, to minimise the loss of seed.
When dried, the plants were lightly beaten on a hurdle or put into linen bags and ‘striped’ with a thin cane to dislodge the seed. The chaff was blown off, and the tiny seeds sorted by hand or sieved to get rid of pieces of stem and husk. Another method was to wash the beaten seed, so that husk floated off, then put the seeds into a cloth bag, dry them, then stamp on them to crush them, before sieving to make a fine mustard flour.
They could also be ground up using a pestle and mortar or quern, but this had to be done carefully to avoid getting mustard dust and oil in the eyes which could be an irritant. By the Elizabeth period, those who could afford it, equipped their sculleries with mustard mills alongside other utensils such as a bread grater and a mortar for spices. But grinding wasn’t the end of the process. The mustard then had to be made into a sauce.
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| Black Mustard Seeds. Photo: Sanjay Acharya |
A 17th century recipe for mustard to be eaten with beef, calls for one and half pints of mustard seed to be ground into honey, olive oil and vinegar.
A more eye-watering sauce was made by soaking slices of horseradish in vinegar, squeezing them out, and adding sugar and a chopped onion to the vinegar. You used this flavoured vinegar to mix into your mustard flour to make a cooking sauce, which you spread beneath beef before braising it, or poured over slices of brawn.
Mustard was also eaten with Poor Jack, dried salt cod, also known as haberdine, served in the cheaper inns or taverns. The fish was inexpensive, but had little flavour, so was consumed with large quantities of mustard. At the other end of the social scale, in wealthy households, plaice, ray and ‘White,’ pickled fish such as herring, ling, or whiting, was also served with mustard sauce. Minced salmon was dressed in a mustard, sugar and vinegar sauce. Goose, wild duck, gulls, woodcock and young herons came served with a mustard sauce, as did rabbit.
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| British mustard pot, John Gold, 1793 Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia, USA Photo: Daderot |
Perhaps Voltaire (1694-1778) had a point when he said, ‘In England there are sixty different religions, but only one sauce.’ Actually, the English Tudors and Jacobeans had a large array of different sauces, but mustard sauce was the one consumed in vast quantities by both the farm labourer and the wealthiest noble, and this was because all were agreed mustard was excellent for the digestion. ‘Let such whose stomachs are so weak they cannot digest their meat or appetite it, take of mustard seed a dram.’ Culpepper (1616-1654)
But while the English could scarcely eat a meal without mustard, the Scots viewed mustard consumption as a sign of weakness. They had long prided themselves on eating their meat with only the good natural gravy that sprang from the juices. In the 1630s, Robert Monro of Opisdale, was appalled by the Scottish soldiers serving in the armies of the King of Sweden whose ‘stomackes could not digest a Gammon of Bacon or cold Beefe without mustard,’ which he saw as evidence of moral degeneracy and feebleness among the once-tough Scottish soldiers.
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| USA Newspaper ASdvert 1922 Mustard still advertised as good for the digestion. |
But mustard wasn’t just used in cooking. Horseradish and mustard are often found growing wild together on old monastic sites and near medieval inns. In the days before heat-gels, aching bones, stiff joints and muscles, the result of spending long, cold days walking or riding, could be eased with ointments made from a mixture of mustard and horseradish, sometimes provided as charity by monasteries, but which innkeepers also sold to suffering travellers. A body rub with the same ointment before setting out was a good way to keep out the cold. Mustard was also used as a cure for all kinds of other ailments, but as with early recipes, it’s not always clear which type of mustard they were using. White mustard, black mustard, hedge mustard, treacle mustard and garlic mustard were all used in cooking and medicinally, but modern botanists class some of these plants as being from different families.
Throughout the Middle Ages, households mostly grew the mustard they required for their own use, not least because young mustard greens were considered an excellent pick-me-up and purge after the long winter months of salt meat and dried beans. Medieval monasteries and manor farms supplied some surplus seed for market, but in Tudor times in ever-expanding cities such as London, many people no longer owned an herb patch, and mustard started to be collected on a commercial scale in the country to be sold in the city.
It was usually transported in the form of solid dry balls, hence Shakespeare’s biting insult in Henry IV when Poins is described as having ‘wits as thick as Tewkesbury mustard.’ In Tewkesbury and elsewhere, cannonballs in iron mortars were used to grind the mustard seeds, which women had gathered from hedgerows and fields. Legend has it when Henry VIII visited Tewkesbury in 1535, he was presented with mustard balls covered in gold leaf.
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| Hedge Mustard, Sisymbrium officinale Photo: Ian Cunliffe CC BY-SA 2.0 |
To make the balls, mustard had to be mixed with a variety of other ingredients to bind it, such as pease-meal, flour, wine or spices and then they were dried. An Italian recipe of 1465, combined the mustard with pounded raisins, cinnamon and cloves. When the ball was crushed and mixed into milk or vinegar, wine or cider, the result was an ‘instant’ sauce. This made it particularly useful for provisioning travellers or using onboard ships.
Not everyone was impressed with the result, though. Peter Mundy 1608-1667 noted in his journal that Tewkesbury mustard ‘is much spoken off, made up in balls as big as hen’s eggs, at 3d and 4d each, although a farthing worth off the ordinary sort will give better content in my opinion, this being in sight and taste much like the old dried thick scurf that sticks by the sides of a mustard pot.’
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| Treacle Mustard or Wormseed Principly used in Tudor times to counteract poisons Photo: Jason Hollinger |
But whether it was for eating or rubbing on, the household and servants in Battle Abbey would have been connoisseurs of mustard, and if Viscount Montague’s sculleryman didn’t ‘cut the mustard’ and temper his seeds perfectly, his wages would have been ‘moonshine in the mustard pot,’ a delightful Jacobean phrase, meaning he’d be paid nothing.
Writing as KJ Maitland, her new novel, Traitor in the Ice, the 2nd in her Jacobean crime thriller series, is published on 31st March 2022, by Headline.
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