Ballpark mustard is made of Turmeric, vinagre, and of course, powdered white mustard seeds. Turmeric is bright yellow, and it gives mustard its typical colour. I have absolutely no reason to know any of this. I bought turmeric one time when I had to cook dinner for a bunch of friends and I felt like saying I used an exotic sounding spice, while I had no idea how it tasted. I misread it as “tumeric,”
Which is ironic, because it's now thought to have cancer-fighting properties.
Why do I know what goes into mustard? Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it.
In particular, he wrote about Grey Poupon and their peculiar success in the mustard world. He explains the circumstances of the rise to notoriety already in I think two of his four books, and he mentions it in his TED talk, as well. The subject has been thoroughly, expertly covered, is what I’m saying.
Every time the subject comes up, however, I get the crazy idea that I want to make my own mustard. It comes from these completely ordinary ingredients! Some that I have around the house anyway, some that I find myself buying by accident, and if French’s and Grey Poupon can have entirely different ingredients (they even use different kinds of mustard seeds) and still both be considered mustard, who’s to say what I could throw together and still end up, inevitably, with mustard?
This is a wildly simplistic statement about writing, particularly the kind of tactical fascination that Malcolm Gladwell writes with. Writing that is candid and persuasive and full of compelling facts. In fact, write well enough, and people might entirely forget about your lovingly deployed prose.
They might find themselves inspired by mustard.
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