Friday, June 12, 2015

The Fruit Explorer Ponders Mustard, Part 1 of 2

The Mustard Museum

I saw an ad in The New Yorker, 8 Oct 2007, p. 95, for the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. 

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This prompted me to visit http://mustardmuseum.com/, which describes the museum's genesis in the following way.

mustard museum? ABSOLUTELY! According to Barry Levenson, founder & curator of the National Mustard Museum, you can blame it all on the Boston Red Sox. In the wee hours of October 28, 1986, after his favorite baseball team had just lost the World Series, Barry was wandering an all-night supermarket looking for the meaning of life. As he passed the mustards, he heard a voice: If you collect us, they will come.




   
  

The museum, which was called the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum in 2007, has been renamed the National Mustard Museum to recognize its increased importance. If mustard is your thing, you can browse this site to pick up mustardiania. You might join the Friends of the National Mustard Museum, sign up for the Mustard of the Month, or browse the on-line store for hard-to-find mustards. A picture of the opening panel of the museum store is below. The guest shop sells more types of mustard than any other place on the planet. Don't miss the gift ideas or the Insane Deal of the Week.

 




   

    



When you visit the museum in Middleton, WI, be sure to stop by the MustardPiece Theater to view a movie that roams the globe to highlight the marvelous magic of mustard. Taste hundreds of mustards at the Tasting Bar. Admission is free. If you want to keep the mustard flowing, however, you are invited to make a donation, which is tax-deductible.

This museum is on the National Register of Hysterical Places. Even this light-hearted place, however, has its dark side, namely the ketchup envy that disfigures some pages of the web site. Also, the founder/curator/director says that those who prefer mayonnaise to mustard are "condimentally challenged" [Antol, p. xi]. (This hit home since I eat mayonnaise but not mustard.)

The founder/curator/director clearly deserves the honorific of The Mustard Explorer. We do, however, feel sorry for his poor wife, who is known as Mrs. Mustard and is expected to hand out mustard recipes.


Extremely Short History of Mustard

Mustard was known in the Indus valley civilization, which died out about 1800 BC. The Romans mixed mustard seeds with grape juice and called it mustum ardens where must is the word for unfermented or partially fermented grape juice and ardens means burning (as in ardent), and this gave rise to our word "mustard." In the tenth century the Romans exported mustard to Gaul, and Dijon became a mustard center. One of the well-known Dijon mustards, Grey Poupon, was established in 1866 when Mr. Grey (the mustard expert) and Mr. Poupon (the investor) became business partners.. The first application of mustard to a hot dog was apparently in 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair, where French's mustard was introduced. This paragraph is based on Wikipedia.

The Botany of Mustard

Start with some botanical terminology. In modern nomenclature, a botanical family is named after the most prominent genus in the family with an added suffix of -aceae. The most prominent genus in the family that includes the mustards is Brassica, so the family name is Brassicaceae. We have seen this suffix before in the family Rutaceae to which citrus fruit belongs (17 Apr 2015) and in the family Malvaceae, to which the cacao tree belongs (16 May 2015). Informal names for this family are the crucifer family (after the resemblance of the four-petaled flowers to a cross), the cabbage family, and the mustard family. In this e-mail I will follow common usage and call the plants in this family the mustards.

The easiest way to identify most wildflowers is by the flower since flowers are quite variable. Mustards, however, are different since the flowers tend to me very much alike; they are usually small, four petaled, white or yellow, and not too variable. It turns out, however, that the seeds pods are quite variable and are the preferred way to distinguish different mustard species. This is why a botanist who want to identify a mustard will glance at the flowers, brush them aside, and intently study the seed pods. It turns out that the mustards are very well represented among the wildflowers of New England. The picture below from a wildflower field identification guide [Newcomb, p. 145] shows a page of mustards. Note the varying seed pods.



The genus Brassica has provided mankind with a treasure trove of useful species, as shown in the table below, which is scanned from Langer and Hill [p. 167]. The species B. oleracea has been bred into a number of varieties that has given us kale, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts. (A botanical convention is that the genus is abbreviated to the first letter when there is no chance of confusion.) One can see in the table other useful plants that are provided by Brassica, but for this e-mail we want to focus on the last three species since the condiment mustard is made from the seeds of these species:
  • B. alba (white mustard)
  • B. juncea (brown mustard or Indian mustard)
  • B. nigra (black mustard)


Below are pictures and drawings of white mustard. Pay special attention to the seed pods and to their shape (like elongated tear drops) and orientation (curve away from the stem). For scale, a full-grown plant is about 18 inches tall. The last picture shows the size of the seeds, where scale is given by grains of rice. Neither Mike nor I has ever seen white mustard, but the reference works say that it sometimes appears in New England if it escapes from cultivation [Britton and Brown, v. 2, p. 191.].


   
   
   
      
      

Here are pictures and drawings of brown (or Indian) mustard. The seed pods, which are cylindrical but taper at each end, form various angles with the stem but tend to point up. This plant usually grows to about a foot and a half but can grow to perhaps three feet. Indian mustard is common around Boston.


   
   

Here are pictures and drawings of black mustard. This plant usually grows to about a foot and a half but can grow to perhaps three feet.  The seed pods are roughly cylindrical, tapering only at the ends, and stick more or less straight up and closely hug the stem. The last picture shows the size of a black mustard seed. Black mustard is common around Boston.


   
   
   


Keep in mind that a seed pod contains multiple seeds just like a peapod contains multiple peas. Pictures below emphasize this.


   

[Continued in Part 2]