Good morning. Today is nonidi, the 29th of Floréal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la sénevé, a wild herb that makes a spicy condiment.
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We covered a different mustard plant ages ago, but it wasn't the kind that you use the seeds of to make a spicy sauce. Today's vocabulary word indicates wild mustard, specifically, but that's a good enough stand-in for cultivated mustard (which didn't get its own day! sorry Dijon!) to mingle them all together. But let's start by giving love to wild mustard, also known as charlock. This plant is endemic to North Africa and is often used as a source of abundant leafy greens, but it does grow seeds that are large, black, and very spicy. It was these mustard seeds that were being referenced in the Bible. While you can make these into a mustard, charlock – as its "wild" name implies – isn't commercially reliable enough to be an ingredient in any common storebought mustard varieties. Let's take a closer look at those...
While "bugloss" sometimes seems like any old snaggle-toothed flowering plant that's blue, "mustard" tends sto get thrown at any seedy flower that's bright yellow. But while the various mustard plants we harvest for spice do come from different genera, they are at least all under the broad Brassica umbrella, making them related to cabbage and other cruciform vegetables.
From a culinary standpoint, the key difference between various mustard varieties comes in the form of seed size and color. And the boldest and most ancient is the black mustard seed, the one that gave mustard its very name.
