GLOBAL – Take a wander down any condiment aisle in France these days, and you’ll notice a pervasive absence between le mayo and le ketchup. Since this May, France has faced a widespread dearth of Dijon mustard, leading one French resident to advertise two jars for sale to the tune of €6,000 or about £5,000. The shortage has incited expats smuggle squeeze bottles of Maille back into the country from places like the US to get their fix, while author and Paris resident David Lebovitz even resorted to hunting his jars down at a local gardening store, of all places.
Omnipresent on French tables, Dijon mustard, made by combining brown mustard seeds with white wine, is a beloved condiment that provides a counterpoint to rich, hearty dishes thanks to its acidity and heat. It’s the perfect accompaniment to a slice of crisp-skinned roast chicken, the ideal way to jazz up a simple ham-and-butter sandwich and an essential ingredient in homemade mayonnaise.
That the condiment is so anchored in France’s Burgundy region – of which Dijon is the capital city – is thanks to the historical co-planting of brown mustard seeds with the region’s renowned grapevines, a practice introduced by the Ancient Romans to provide the vines with essential nutrients like phosphorous. Monks continued to cultivate mustard in this fashion for centuries, and, in 1752, the link between Dijon and mustard was cemented thanks to Dijon local Jean Naigeon, who married the seeds, not with vinegar, but with verjuice – the juice of unripe wine grapes historically used to add a pleasantly sour flavour to recipes in regions inhospitable to citrus.
Dijon mustard stands out from other mustards on the market for its subtle, balanced flavour. Packing more heat than American yellow mustard but less than powerful Chinese mustard or Bavarian senf, it capitalises on the pungency of the mustard seed by marrying it with the pleasant acidity of local Burgundian verjuice or, in most contemporary iterations, white wine.
But the truth is that despite its historical link the to the region, Dijon mustard has been delocalised for quite some time.
After Burgundian farmers largely abandoned mustard cultivation in favour of higher-paying crops decades ago, moutardiers began looking further afield for the tiny seed at the root of the condiment that launched 1,000 “Pardon me, sir” jokes. Their mustard seed needs were chiefly met by Canada, which produces about 80% of the world’s supply. But this winter, Canadian-grown mustard also dried up, when, after several years of declining production had reduced stores, dry summer weather obliterated the Canadian crop, sending mustard seed prices skyrocketing threefold.
Though the shortage was not caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was exacerbated by it, impacting Dijon mustard makers “indirectly”, according to Luc Vandermaesen, CEO of mustard producer Reine de Dijon. Rather than the brown seeds required for Dijon, Ukraine predominantly produces the white variety used in yellow and English mustard. Given the conflict, producers less tied to specific mustard varieties turned to Canada’s already meagre supply, intensifying the shortage.
Inadvertently, this all shed new light on the discrepancy between the name “Dijon mustard” and where it’s made. After all, unlike Champagne or Roquefort, the “Dijon” in Dijon mustard refers to a specific recipe and not to a geographic region protected by an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) or Appellation d’Origine Protégée (AOP) designation, which regulate products like wine, cheese and even lentils with an iron fist.
“There are no rules keeping the production of Dijon mustard in [the city of] Dijon,” said Sophie Mauriange of the Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (INAO), the governing board that controls the AOC and AOP labels in France. “You can make it anywhere in the world.”
And they do. Grey-Poupon, created in Dijon by Maurice Grey and Auguste Poupon in 1866 (and the preferred mustard of American hip-hop artists), has been made in the US since the 1940s. And in 2009, nine years after its purchase by Unilever, France’s biggest Dijon producer, Amora-Maille (which makes Maille mustard), closed its Dijon factory, moving production to the nearby commune of Chevigny-Saint-Sauveur.
“As far as we know,” said Mauriange, “there is almost no production of mustard in Dijon itself, save a very small amount at [La Moutarderie] Fallot’s Dijon shop.” (The artisanal producer has long made the bulk of its mustard at its factory in the nearby town of Beaune, where it was founded in 1840, and only opened its Dijon boutique, complete with a small, on-site workshop, in 2014.)
The truth is that while Dijon is in the mustard’s name, the product is – and always has been – rooted in the city’s surrounding countryside, where mustard production flourished in the decades that followed the condiment’s 1752 invention. Charcoal producers would sow mustard seeds in fields filled with coal residue, a natural fertiliser, and the resulting seeds, explained Marc Désarménien, CEO and third generation head of La Moutarderie Fallot, were sold to master moutardiers in Dijon or Beaune.
“They had organised into a cooperative, at the time,” Désarménen said of the local master moutardiers, of which there were already 33 in the early 19th Century. “So, there was what I would call a fairly powerful, fairly strong mustard industry.”
