Cutting the mustard, finally

Planting my garden, powered by mustard, and a recipe for roast chicken with potatoes that taste just like the delicious ones you buy with rotisserie chicken.

The plant fair outside of Bessan town hall.

I’m here to tell you there was consternation in the aisles. When we first moved to France in September 2021, my social media was full of pictures of empty shelves in British supermarkets, but we never experienced anything like that here.

Until a few months in, when I went to our local HyperU, a vast hangar of a place where you could easily get your 10,000 steps in just walking from the cheese counter to the charcuterie. I filled my trolley, crossing off the things on my shopping list: laundry detergent; wine; cat litter; kitchen paper; tick, tick, tick, tick. Then into the condiments acre, where there was oil, vinegar, ketchup, a dozen kinds of mayonnaise, and then a huge gap, two metres wide and a dozen shelves high where the mustard should have been. Not a single jar to be had. Will no one think of the vinaigrette? I gazed at the shelves, along with half a dozen other shoppers, as though staring into the void of the Grand Canyon. There was tutting, consternation, shrugs, muttering.

This was the Great Mustard crisis of 2022. Most of France’s mustard seeds come from Canada, and a cold, wet spring did for half the 2021 harvest. The Canadians are citing climate change for the poor crop and rising costs of, well, everything else for this most unfortunate episode.

Local message boards were full of helpfulness. “I just saw some in Aldi, be quick.” “Have you tried the organic shop?” “I found a little jar on Amazon, but it was €9.” And of course, there are the wags. “I have a 915g, unopened jar of mustard, only a few months out of date. Will swap for car. No silly offers, I know what I have…” A friend arrived for dinner carrying a jar of mustard as though it were a bottle of the finest Pétrus. She’d scored it at Auchan - only two jars per person.

No French mustard to be had…. This was a few months into The Mustard Crisis, when Polish and Romanian mustard began to arrive on the shelves.

It was all fun and games, but no help at all with what I was going to serve with the ham. You can’t just send cornichons to do mustard’s job. I have an abiding love of mustard and probably eat it every day in one guise or another, in dressings, marinades and casseroles, rubbed onto roasts and spooned into sauces. Sometimes even spooned directly into my mouth if I am being completely honest, but that’s just between you and me. If ever I’m wondering what a dish needs, if it’s not a good squeeze of lemon, it’s a dab of mustard, sometimes both. They lift everything.

This view was compounded years ago when, in my job as a food writer, I visited the Maille mustard factory in Dijon, the city in Burgundy that was once mustard central. As I stood there on the processing floor, my eyes streaming with tears, struggling to speak, the Macron-neat director calmly explained to me that he hadn’t had a cold since he started working there. That’s what a small daily dose of what is essentially mustard gas will do for you. I hope he remains in robust good health. After 98 years, the Dijon factory closed in 2008 and the brand is now owned by Unilever, who moved most of the production to Canada. Incidentally, this lead to a class action suit by mustard mavens in California (where else?) who felt mislead by the Frenchy-French Maille labels into believing they were buying a fine French condiment, rather than something imported from their neighbours to the north.

But I digress. I am here to talk about the level of consternation the absence of mustard evoked across the land. Some seemed to be taking a crop failure in Canada, and the absence of imported seeds from Russia and Ukraine, as a personal affront. Even to me, a mustardophile of the most passionate sort, it seemed like a lot of fuss about a condiment.

But being cross via the turbo-tut is a fine French tradition.

In London, the only time I went to Hackney Town Hall was for friends’ weddings and citizenship ceremonies. But here, it’s like the father and his Windex in My Big Fat Greek Wedding - a trip to the town hall is the cure for almost everything. A dispute with your neighbour? Someone making too much noise on a Sunday? A dog barking in the night? Someone lit a bonfire? Painted their shutters the wrong colour? Allez à la mairie (Go to the town hall). The more petty, the better. Sometimes it honestly feels like any crime against public spiritedness is the societal equivalent of GBH.

Years ago, I had a friend who had an apartment in a lovely building in Le Touquet. One afternoon, the buzz entry system on the front door stopped working. "Shall we call someone?” I said. “What on earth for? It stopped working about an hour ago. Every other person in this building will have called the poor caretaker by now. Possibly more than once.”

There is a certain fussiness, a fastidiousness, which sometimes is the flipside of all of the neighbourly kindness and concern that’s part of French village life. Of course this can take on a darker hue, too. In the north of the national park, a friend tells me that no sooner do the authorities put up speed cameras in some of the villages, than someone comes along in the night and shoots them into uselessness. I’ve heard stories of a speeding motorist who ran over a dog and then, mysteriously, had his car scratched and his tyres slashed because he was aggressive and didn’t apologise. His morals and his manners were found wanting and that is absolutely unforgivable.

And yet there is enormous forbearance for things which to me, a Londoner, feel entirely enraging: the hundredweight of paperwork required to achieve the simplest of administrative goals, the labyrinthine pathways one must negotiate to achieve the most basic of services, the inability to answer emails, the insistence on telephoning…The latter is nothing to do with my inadequate French. Even in my English life, I would do almost anything to avoid calling, and I still react to a phone ringing as though someone set off a firecracker in the room. I’m learning, slowly, to shrug all of these things off and saving my energy for the truly important things in life, such as the presence, or absence, of mustard.

So I am delighted to share with you that after the absence of more than a year, French mustard is back on the shelves of the HyperU. It is still outnumbered by the jars and jars and jars of chauvinistically ignored Polish and Romanian mustard, but it is there. Be still, Maille heart.

Be still Maille heart.

This weekend, I am working on my garden, trying to tend to the long-untended beds and to get them into shape for summer. There was a plant fare in Bessan yesterday, a pretty market town about 10 kilometres from here, so I filled my basket with some more pink pelargoniums (I cannot resist), some violettes de Toulouse and Armeria maritima (sea thrift, appropriately enough) to creep among the gravel, and some strokable Stachys byzantine. I have always loved this stachys, commonly known in England as lambs’ ears and here as bears’ ears (l’oreille d’ours), for its velvety silver leaves. I longed to grow it, but my London garden was too shady, the soil too heavy. Now I have the perfect growing conditions for my new lamb-bear pet.

With the plan to spend as much time in the garden as possible this weekend, I wanted to make something for lunch that would require as little attention from me as possible. A one-tray chicken-potato-onion recipe spiked with my beloved mustard was just the ticket. I don’t know if this weekend I am celebrating gardening or celebrating mustard, but each have a tender, unassailable place in my heart.

Mustard roast chicken with potatoes

This makes a great weekend lunch – just add some sort of green vegetable for perfection and health. The potatoes aren’t crisply roasted, but they are full of flavour from the wine, onion and juices from the chicken. In fact, they taste quite like the potatoes you buy from French markets, the ones that cook in the tray beneath all of the rotisserie chickens. No higher recommendation, honestly.