Today’s recipe is one of many for honey mustards, and my favourite combination:
12 Mustard
For a good mustard, take mustardseed and dry it cleanly and then pound it in very small in a mortar. Then pass it through a tight cloth (and pound) cinnamon flower (czinmit pluot) and mix it into the mustard and stir it together with honey, properly like beaten wax (recht als der wachs bertt). If you wish (to serve it), take a little of this and rub it with wine, and you will have good mild mustard.
Cinnamon flower shows up in a few German recipes, but not very frequently. They are the dried unripe fruit of the cinnamon tree, and some traditional German recipes, especially those associated with Christmas, still call for them. They taste much like cinnamon.
What makes this recipe interesting is that it produces an instant sauce. This is something we find occasionally in various German recipe sources, so there obviously was demand. Here, the mustardseed is mixed into a thick paste with honey, then dissolved into a sauce as required. The honey locks in volatile oils rather well, so the resulting mix is potent.
Bound together with medicinal, veterinary, and magical texts, the culinary recipes of Munich Cgm 384 were partly published in 1865 as “Ein alemannisches Büchlein von guter Speise“. The manuscript dates to the second half of the fifteenth century. My translation follows the edition by Trude Ehlert in Münchner Kochbuchhandschriften aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, Tupperware Deutschland, Frankfurt 1999, which includes the first section of recipes not published earlier.