Yellow Mustard and the Mystery of Natural Flavors

I am a huge condiment person and this blog will likely reflect these affections as time goes on. BBQ sauce, steak sauce, ketchup, cocktail sauce, tartar sauce, hot sauce, blue cheese dressing, sriracha, and every flavor of aioli under the sun…I apply these in very specific situations, so I can be picky about when I use them. But I use them all, and I think they add a lot to so many different foods. Mustards are fantastic! I use Dijon in my home made salad dressings and love to couple the sweetness of honey mustard with hot pepper relish on my turkey wraps. I recognize the seemingly infinite number of mustard varieties and appreciate the fact that many artisans have elevated the craft of mustard making to soaring heights of gourmet goodness. I love it when the charcuterie board that comes to the table features an insanely flavorful mustard as one of the condiments. Grainy, spicy, French, Trappist, stone ground, horseradish-infused…bring it on! With all of that said, I’m bringing this blog post back home to the American refrigerator and taking a closer look at the bright yellow, plastic bottle of French’s mustard.

I feel like yellow mustard is one of those wicked good products that just gets a bad rap. I simply love this stuff on hot dogs, sausages at the game, and mixed with ketchup on a cheeseburger at the beach.

So I thought I’d grab the bottle of French’s from the fridge and do some exploring. What’s kind of amazing right out of the gate is that there’s virtually no nutritional impact here…good or bad. No calories, no sugar, no fat, no vitamins, minerals, protein, or cholesterol. The only things that makes the label is a scintilla of sodium. The list of ingredients is also surprisingly recognizable—distilled vinegar, water, #1 grade mustard seed, salt, turmeric, paprika, spice, natural flavor, garlic powder. Given the color of the product, one might expect some serious synthetic food coloring…some Yellow Dye #5 for good measure. But evidently the turmeric does the trick, testimony to the power of many Indian foods to instantly and irrevocably stain your clothes if you’re not careful.

Of course, I did want to ask about “spice” and “natural flavor.” These ingredients feel a little purposefully ambiguous. I did note that, on the back of the bottle (see picture above), the company gives me three different access points to more information: a website, a QR code, and a phone number. I started with the QR code, which brought me to a very well formatted, user-friendly site run by “smartlabel.” They listed all of these ingredients above with descriptions. So for example, “natural flavor” was described as follows:

Natural Flavor - The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.

So what I got here was a description of everything natural flavor could be, but no clear indication of what’s actually in my bottle of mustard. The description of “spice” was also fairly elaborate yet uninformative. Further, when I moved over to the “Allergens” tab, I received a list of foods to which people are commonly allergic, with no indication of whether these might be present. These were some downsides to what comes across as a confused attempt at transparency. However, I did get fairly clear indication that the product is Kosher, gluten free, and vegetarian. There was also a hyperlink for recipes.

Not to be denied in my quest to learn which spices and natural flavorings are whipped into my bottle of yellow mustard, I ventured forth to the website: www.frenchs.com. This was more than a little overwhelming, as the world of French’s products is a vast landscape of condiments and vacuum sealed fried vegetables whose origins can probably be traced to vintage-era backyard cookouts where the adults drank martinis while their grade school children shared their first cigarettes behind the shed. All over the webpages, there are links to other mammoth product lines under the titanic McCormick corporate umbrella—equally vast and suburban. Names like Lawry’s, Old Bay, and Zatarain’s brought me back to my childhood looking at bottles of spices in the cupboard that were older than I was.

Amidst it all, I was able to find the product spotlight for my yellow mustard. But alas, “natural flavors” and “spice” were still on the list, with no further clues to the deepening mystery. In what I thought might be a stroke of genius, I traveled to the spotlight page for French’s organic yellow mustard. Surely those customers willing to pay extra for the word “organic” would be entitled to an explanation! But French’s was too wily, expertly deflecting my attack with a simple listing of “organic spices” and “organic natural flavors.”

Last chance…the telephone number. I called the number on the bottle and was quickly offered the choice to ask someone about ingredients. Yes! After I pressed the appropriate number, a recorded message walked me through a well-rehearsed PSA that listed all of the allergens French’s looks out for. The message assured me that none of these allergens was contained in ambiguous ingredients like “natural flavors” or “spice.” So close! Then I was offered the opportunity to speak to a representative, so I took it.

Marlina came on the phone almost right away and asked how she could help me. I explained my quest, that I was hoping to get some more specific information on the natural flavors and spice in my yellow mustard. She seemed unfazed asked me to read the numbers below the bar code on my bottle.

It was like a moment from the DaVinci Code. These numbers weren’t just for the checkout machine to read the price. These numbers were the key to the French’s secret society vaults, and they’d been hiding in plain sight for decades.

“4-1-5-0-0-0-0-7-0-0”

<pause>

“Sir, the composition of the natural flavors and spice in the yellow mustard is proprietary information.”

<pause>

“So, these are the…‘secret ingredients’…of French’s yellow mustard?”

<pause>

“These are proprietary sir.”

<pause>

“Thank you.” Click.

And that was the end. I had journeyed to the edge of a forbidden realm only to be turned away, an unworthy yet devoted commoner. In my travels, I learned that French’s yellow mustard debuted in 1904 at the St. Louis World’s Fair, and I marveled at how the website took pains to remind me that French’s products are “not from France.” I learned that a person named Dorcas Reilly invented green bean casserole, and I came to accept that there are trace amounts of natural flavors and spice in my yellow mustard that will forever remain a mystery to me.