Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Mustard Seeds along with all the trcipes employing Mustard Seeds presented on this site, with 300 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Mustard Seeds recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Mustard Seeds as a major wild food ingredient.

Mustard seeds are the seeds of several plant species (all related to rapeseed) that produce seeds which are used as a spice. They are members of the Brassica family that includes broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale and swedes. The green parts of many mustard plants are eaten as 'mustard greens'.

Mild white mustard (Brassica hirta) grows wild in North Africa, the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe and has spread farther by long cultivation (in Northern Europe early wild forms of Brassica rapa were probably used for their seeds which had a more mustard-like taste and less oil than modern cultivars as evidenced by the presence of their seeds in many neolithic burials); brown or Indian mustard (B. juncea), originally from the foothills of the Himalaya, is grown commercially in the UK, Canada and the US; black mustard (B. nigra) in Argentina, Chile, the US and some European countries.



Mustard seeds can be fried in oil until the seeds 'pop', yielding a flavoured oil, as is done in Indian cuisine. The seeds can also be ground and added to stews and meat dishes. In the west, the most common use of mustard seed is in the form of a prepared mustard condiment. This is made by mixing mustard powder with a liquid such as water, wine, honey or even milk to form the paste. The 'heat' of such mustards being reduced by mixing the ground mustard with flour. This kind of condiment was probably first prepared by the Romans who mixed ground mustard with unfermented grape juice to produce mustum ardens (burning must). As one of the few hot spices native to Europe mustards were very commonly used during the Medieval and Elizabethan periods, as exemplified by this recipe for Collar of Brawn and Mustard.