Meditations on mustard

When my hairdresser back in Indiana learned I was moving to Paris, he advised me not to miss visiting the Maille mustard store in the Place Madeleine.  "You can't believe how good their mustard is--so fresh and hot!" he enthused.  It took me a couple of years to get around to taking his advice.  I was planning to cook a lapin à la moutarde, and his words echoed in my memory.  I got on the Métro.

The Maille boutique in the Place Madeleine glitters with black and gold, the company colors.  Inside are multitudes of Maille mustards and vinegars, as well as accountrements to go with them, such as Quimper mustard pots.  The walls are lined with glittering arrays of jars of mustard aromatized with every imaginable flavor.  I ignore all those.  From the plastic bag on my arm I withdraw two stoneware Maille mustard pots with corks.  I hand them to the woman behind the counter. 

"De la moutarde à l'ancienne et au vin blanc, s'il vous plaît;" I tell her.  My recipe for rabbit with mustard sauce takes two kinds of Dijon mustard:  grainy and smooth.  Much as a barman might draw a draft beer, she fills my two recycled pots with fresh-pumped mustard, places a thin disk of waxed paper on the mouth of each pot, and corks them firmly.  One of the beauties of the mustard shop is that you can bring those pots back for refilling, so you only pay for the pots themselves once.  After that, you only pay for the mustard, which is ridiculously cheap, especially considering how delicious it is.

Once again I'd had a craving for rabbit with mustard sauce--surely one of the world's great dishes.  (Who was the Bourgignon who had the stroke of genius of slathering rabbit with mustard before cooking it?  They should erect a statue of him in Dijon, in my opinion.)  I opened my just purchased moutarde à l'ancienne and stuck my little wooden mustard spoon into the jar.  I dug out half a cup of the fragrant, grainy mustard for my recipe, and...licked the spoon.  I closed my eyes.  It tasted sooo good!  So good that I got a clean spoon and dug out another blob which I ate--straight--just like that.  Like a whiff of a ripe Epoisse cheese, the intensity of that mustard transported me straight to Burgundy--the region of France with perhaps the best-defined sense of terroir in the country.

The mustard was so good that it inspired an entirely bourgignon dinner.  I made a jambon persillé (parsleyed ham), of course the rabbit with mustard, and followed it with a most traditional apple-custard tart.  For Burgundy is nothing if not the home of most of France's great comfort dishes.  I got out the Maille cornichon pickles for the ham, the Aligoté white wine I'd used to prepare it, the red and white burgundies we'd have with dinner, a bottle of crème de cassis we'd use to make kirs in aperitif, and, of course, my venerable mustard pots.  I was struck by how these objects, grouped together, looked as if they were posing for a family portrait.  They were harmonious, and they had reason to be.  They were like the notes in a symphony of flavors united by that inimitable notion of terroir--a small geographic zone defined by particular soil, climate, vegetation, and human culture that gives rise to uniquely local flavors.  A sense of terroir--whether you're cooking French or Chinese--is the surest way I know to construct a harmonious and pleasing menu.  Terroir is the opposite of fusion.  It's tradition in the deepest sense.  And as we gathered around the table that evening, we celebrated the terroir of Burgundy with every bite.

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