1 hour ago, Toliver said:This is a recipe from the 1956 edition Better Homes & Garden New Cookbook that my mom used to make whenever we had ham. It was a sinus-clearing mustard dipping sauce using Colman's Dry Mustard (a British product, I believe) in the bright yellow can. Later editions of that cookbook would omit this recipe completely:
It had to be a fresh can of dry mustard. I think if it sat too long in the cupboard it lost its potency.
In many American-Chinese restaurants, if you ordered egg rolls, you'd get a half ketchup, half hot mustard dipping sauce. And if the restaurant was very creative, they would make the ketchup-mustard look like the Ying-Yang symbol in the dish.
The mustard in the restaurants was called "Chinese Hot Mustard" (even though it had nothing to do with China) which you can find in most condiment aisles in American grocery stores.
I don't remember ever being served ketchup as a sub for duck sauce. Duck sauce involves vinegar, soy sauce, apricot or other fruit jam and maybe garlic and ginger or something that approximates that combo. It was sweet, but not tomato-like.
As for books the two I relied on when just learning to use my wok living in SF about 40 years ago,were Regional Cooking of China by Margaret Gin and Henry Chung's Hunan Style Chinese Cookbook. Those were the days when the original hole-in-the-wall Hunan Restaurant had just opened in Chinatown. I don't think there was much more than a counter for service. I lived three blocks up the hill on the cable car route.
