mustard - etymology & story (podictionary 553)

As you slather that mustard on your burger little do you think of the Romans who named this delicious yellow condiment.

Mustard is made from mustard seeds but the plant takes the name from
the foodstuff and not the other way around.  Mustard is made by
crushing those little tiny seeds into powder and then mixing the powder
with water or some other good fluid that might add some extra flavor. 
You can buy powdered mustard and find out just how hot those little
seeds are in their natural state.  The kind of bright yellow mustard
that most people in North America slather on hot dogs and hamburgers is
tame stuff in comparison.

But the powdered mustard does not yet have what it takes, or at least what it took, to be named mustard by
those ancient Romans.  Slightly higher on the snack bracket scale is
Dijon mustard.  Real Dijon mustard comes from Dijon France and there
are two reasons why Dijon mustard is appropriate for this discussion. 
One is that Dijon mustard is not made with water, it is made with wine.

Yum yum, I’ll come back to this in a second.

The other reason is that Dijon France is in France and the word mustard wasn’t the word mustard back
in ancient Roman times as I first implied.  The Latin that turned into
French over the intervening centuries also crushed the Latin words that
were the ingredients of the word mustard, into a single French word that gave us our single English word mustard.

Here’s how it went.  The old Romans mixed the crushed seeds from
this plant with grape juice.  Of course when grape juice ferments it
becomes wine—a connection to Dijon.  But before grape juice ferments it
isn’t called wine, it’s called must because those Romans again called “new wine” mustum. 
So now imagine yourself back in Rome in your toga and you take a big
gulp of this must that has a bunch of these crushed seeds in it.  Your
face turns red and you begin to sweat and you remark that this must is
damn spicy.  In fact it’s fiery.

Shifting gears for just a second I want to point out that our English word ardent, as in “I love my wife ardently”, comes from the Latin word for “fire.”

So back to the fiery grape juice.  In Latin fiery grape juice is mustum ardens. Pop those two Latin words into the food processor and squish together in the French manner and out comes our word mustard; mustum ardens … mustard.