Mustard, first invented in Durham in 1720, makes a comeback

A Durham lady called Mrs Clements is regarded as the mother of all mustard, and it is probably 150 years since her recipe was followed in the city but now Anya Kirkby, the modern mistress of mustard, is using it to create handmade Durham Mustard.

“I went through old agricultural books, food history books, Mrs Beeton’s recipe books – it is a bible, and has Mrs Clements’ mustard recipes in – and as I did so, Mrs Clements came alive: she was up and down the country selling her mustard, this little old lady from County Durham, it is quite incredible,” says Anya (above), who came across the tale of Mrs Clements when she was working at Beamish museum.

“Having this lovely local history story, which has become forgotten over the years, is such an important part of my business model – it is what people are most interested in.”

Mustard has been around for millennia. The Romans gave it its name – they called it “mustum ardens”, or “burning must” as they added mustard seeds to must, or unfermented grape juice.

In Durham, in 1486 cathedral monks in a monastic cell on the Farne Islands were using quern stones to grind “mwstert” seeds into a powder, but it was the marvellous Mrs Clements – and “the knock-kneed men of Durham” – who really made it hot stuff.

An early Durham Mustard box, complete with a Durham bull at its centre

Mrs Clements’ seeds were grown at Houghall Farm near Shincliffe, and the key to her success was her sifting processes which removed all the husks and bits of stalk. Then, in an alley off Saddler Street, she put her menfolk to work pounding and grinding the seeds into a pure, perfect powder – the men held their grinding mills between their legs which made them look knock-kneed.

In a yard off Saddler Street, probably where Vennels cafe is today, Mrs Clements had her mustardry

Anya is currently buying in her mustard powder pre-ground. “To get the seeds grown in Durham again is the goal,” she says. “According to agricultural magazines, mustard is slowly becoming more popular as a cover crop when the field is having a rest for a year – there’s growing evidence that it is a natural herbicide.”

She then hires village hall kitchens across the county and follows Mrs Clements’ recipe to re-create the original Durham taste.

“It is a secret,” she says, “but the key is water and vinegar and getting the consistency and flavour right.”

You can add any liquid to your mustard powder – beer, wine, fruit juices, even honey for sweetness. For example, at Dijon in France, they added unfermented grape juice to their powder in 1856 to create their unmistakably French mustard.

An old Durham Mustard tin, with the Durham bull as its logo

All the indicators are that in 1720 in Durham, Mrs Clements kept it simple, with just vinegar and water, to turn her pure powder into the hot and smooth product that became known as English mustard.

But even here, there are variables: if, for instance, you add hot water to the powder, it produces a mild mustard; if you add cold water, it produces hot mustard.

“Durham Mustard is a very traditional English mustard,” says Anya, 29, who is being supported in the venture by Visit County Durham and Taste Durham. “When I was doing the sampling of current English mustards, it’s almost as if they have lost their Englishness: they are all a bit vinegary and very smooth. Durham Mustard is thicker and hotter – it sticks to the back of a spoon.

“And it is not bright yellow – mustard only became that vibrant almost neon yellow when turmeric was added to it at the start of the 20th Century.”

As well as a maker of mustard, Mrs Clements was a great saleswoman. She even got her mustard to King George I who became a regular customer and placed it on his Christmas dinner table – condiments of the season, your majesty – which really launched her into profitability.

It became a big business for the whole of the county: farmers sold their mustard crop for up to £100-an-acre, the knock-kneed men did the grinding, and a pottery in Gateshead made the containers. A Durham bull came to be the emblem of Durham Mustard, perhaps because the bull was the emblem of the Neville family or because Durham at the end of the 18th Century was known for its super-large shorthorn cattle.

But Mrs Clements had not patented her method of production, and rival firms soon began eating into her market. In particular, Keen & Sons established a mustard-making business in Garlick Hill, London, in 1742 – some people say that they are where the phrase “keen as mustard” came from.

Mrs Clements’ daughter married Joseph Ainsley, whose family had been making flour in the city since 1692. The Ainsleys milled their mustard in a flour mill at Crook Hall and had their mustard-making premises at 22 Silver Street.

John Balmbrough's advert for Durham mustard hinting at the schism in the Ainsley family of mustard-makers

However, in the 1840s, the Ainsley family separated into rival mustard-making camps. Eleanor Ainsley married John Balmbrough who made “Ainsley’s celebrated mustard” from the Silver Street mustardry.

However, another member of the Ainsley family, William, established another mustardworks in Saddler Street, near where Mrs Clements had the knock kneed men at work, and he too claimed to manufacture the original Durham mustard.

There were rivals further afield, too. In Norwich, Jeremiah Colman had been grinding the mustard seed which was grown in great quantities on the East Anglian fens in a water mill since 1814, and in 1855 his sons began marketing it in distinctive yellow and red packaging. They even adopted the head of a Durham bull as their logo to indicate the pungent power of their product and in 1866, Queen Victoria granted them the Royal Warrant for the mustard that had so tickled the tastebuds of her great-great-great-grandfather George I when Mrs Clements had introduced him to it.

Colman's mustard with a Durham bull on the front

The Durham industry was now in decline, but in 1880, The Northern Echo’s roving reporter (above)  visited William Ainsley in his mustard mills in Waddington Street in the shadow of the railway viaduct. Mr Ainsley told how he imported his mustard seeds from Yorkshire, dried them over steam pipes, crushed them between steel rollers before feeding them under 12 steam-driven beaters to pound them into pungency, much as Mrs Clements’ knock kneed men had done. Then his young female packagers placed the powder into quarter pound square tins for market.

Mr Ainsley was advertising his mustard in the Echo in 1884 (above), but after that the mills fell quiet. The Ainsley name was taken over by Keen & Sons which, in 1903, was taken over by Colman’s of Norwich who to this day still use the Durham bull as the symbol of mustard.

This has meant Anya can’t use it on her Durham Mustard jars, but she has chosen an off-yellow and olive green scheme which seem to have been the colours favoured by the Durham makers in the Victorian period.

“When I came across the story while in the commercial department at Beamish, I thought there must be a market for this fantastic product,” says Anya, who worked at the museum for 10 years while taking for a degree in agriculture and then a masters in museum studies at Newcastle.

Making historic artisan mustard, therefore, is an unlikely combination of her two areas of study, but it seems to, ahem, cut the mustard.

“The trend since Covid has been for people to become more passionate about buying locally, about buying for a story and having an experience, rather than buying something just because it is cheap,” she says.

“Rather than selling it at small food markets, my dream is for restaurants, hotels and food producers to be using it – we think that Mrs Clements started her business in the yard off Saddler Street where Vennels café is now and I would love it for them to be using Durham Mustard.

“I want to embed it across Durham so that it becomes part of the culture of the county once again, just as it was in Mrs Clements’ day.”

• For more information about Durham Mustard and to contact Anya, go to durhammustard.com, where Anya can also be booked for talks to WIs and U3As about Durham’s place in the history of mustard making.
• Mustard is naturally a yellow-grey sort of colour, and it was the French brothers, Robert and Francis, who added turmeric to their mustard in Rochester, New York, to make it vibrant, neon yellow. The first marketed their “cream salad mustard” at the 1904 St Louis World Fair as a condiment fit for hot dogs.