By Carina Magyar in Herbs — Mar 4, 2023

IV: Hedge Mustard

The search for the perfect voice tonic.

The somewhat unphotogenic hedge mustard. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning. Today is quartidi, the 14th of Ventôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le vélar, a salad green beloved by caterpillars.

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Hedge mustard gets the least respect of all the mustard plants. It was even kicked out of the wildflower genus for being too weedy. (This former classification is why some translations of the calendar list this as "wallflower" day, but the original French word was generally applied to a mustard, so it was likely in reference to this species.) It's not your go-to for making mustard, and when compared to garlic mustard, it's not the favorite of foraging cooks. However, it grows everywhere, and once you learn to identify its nubbly, fuzz-free stems, it provides an easy and delightful salad green for pretty much zero effort.

This is the singer's plant. Beloved by opera divas, public speakers, and town criers from time immemorial, a concoction made of hedge mustard was (and still is) widely believed to cure any hoarse throat, especially from overuse.

There's science to back this up. As a member of the brassica family, it's a cousin of cruciform vegetables like broccoli and bok choi, and contains the same little tingly compound that makes those vegetables so healthy, just in larger amounts. The compound is known as isothiocyanate, or ITC for short, and a few years ago, some Italian scientists set about trying to make the perfect voice-healing beverage by crushing up hedge mustard and liquefying it in different ways.

IV: Hedge Mustard

III: Fumitory

V: Goat

III: Fumitory

V: Goat

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