has never carried the price tag of rarity, unlike its imported brethren peppercorn and vanilla. The hearty mustard plant enjoys the resiliency of a weed and knows few geographical boundaries, growing anywhere and everywhere. After marketing genius Jeremiah Colman founded his eponymous English mustard in 1814, it eventually garnered such attention that Queen Victoria appointed him as royal mustard maker in 1866.
In the 1920s, a Colman's ad campaign called upon the talents of novelist Dorothy Sayer (then slumming as an ad copywriter) to conceive of a fake group, the so-called Mustard Club. The club was peopled by the likes of Lady Di Gester and Master Mustard, Lord Bacon of Cookham and other punny players. For some seven years, the Mustard Club flourished, attracting hundreds of members, creating a short film, filing a prank lawsuit against a restaurant that allegedly refused to make its mustard fresh each day and producing a monthly newsletter, a recipe book, club songs and even a deck of playing cards. The brilliant thing about the Mustard Club was that everyone could belong.
To this day, the spice retains much of its accessibility, albeit one limited to more conservative and mostly palate-related purposes.
Now fields in the North Bay are aglow with the bright yellow blooms of the mustard plant. However, even in an age ruled by science, the plant's wintertime presence here is still explained by legend. It is said that many years ago, the Spanish missionary Father Junipero Serra scattered Spanish mustard seeds along his Missionary trail.
And then of course, there's mustard's role in the lure of tourism. Now in its 13th year, the annual Napa Valley Mustard Festival, which started as a way to entice tourists to the area during the slow season, is a two-month-long series of festivities in honor of the pungent spice.
Ironically, Napa's nonnative mustard plants are not one of the varieties used in condiment making, though they can be served as greens. Popular among vintners and grape growers, the weedlike plant also adds nitrogen to soil and helps keep the dirt in place during heavy winter rains. The golden flowers should find themselves quite at home in Napa's vineyards. The very word "mustard" derives from the way the Romans prepared the condiment, mixing the powder from ground mustard seeds with unfermented wine, also called must or verjus.
Although mustard seeds have been unearthed from Egyptian tombs, it seems that the first written records of the spice as a condiment weren't made until the 14th century. Most notably, the city of Dijon restricted the condiment's ingredients exclusively to high-quality vinegar and mustard seeds. Mustard has evolved since then, however, especially in the United States, where, oddly, no federal standard defines what constitutes a mustard, although ketchup is not so neglected.
As new mustard condiments become more creative, some are also getting more honest. Robert Curry, executive chef of Auberge du Soleil and host chef of this year's festival, explains that since the 1990s there has been a trend toward making better mustard more accessible. "Instead of being this kind of bland, plain, American mustard, it's gone to a stronger, Dijon-style mustard that you'd recognize on your grocery shelf. There's more acidity now. It's more tangy, more honest, truer to what mustard really is," he comments casually.
But the mustard green itself has always had a solid, honest and sensible presence in regional cuisines worldwide. Peter Pahk, executive chef of Napa's Silverado Resort and winner of last year's People's Choice Chef Award, focuses on the mustard green as a soul food, cheap and slow cooking. He remembers his mother pickling mustard greens to make kimchi. Although the Korean dish is traditionally made with cabbage, mustard was widely and cheaply available where Pahk grew up with modest means on the island of Oahu.
Later, as a longtime employee of the international Ritz-Carlton, he tasted different regional preparations of mustard greens, from the Philippines, where it's often braised, to Singapore 