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| Take as much black mustard seeds ground down to flour as you wish. Take fresh pears, roast bake them, grind down in a clay bowl and press through a sieve. {{...}} Add as much strong wine vinegar as you need, grated honey cake, as much honey or sugar as you need, small amounts of cinnamon, ginger, cloves; mix it all and leave in a warm place to ferment, then store and add small amounts to your dishes.

How to make it at home? First, we ground the mustard seeds (we used white instead of black) in a mortar. If you've got quern-stones, then even better. You could used a coffee grinder, but only if you're okay with drinking mustard-flavoured coffee later on. Once the seeds are ground, mix the mustard flour with a little cold water – just enough to obtain a thick mush. It's the water that helps release the enzymes which give produce the specific mustard flavour. At this point you could add some vinegar, a little salt and you'd already have some basic mustard. But what we want is mustard with pears and gingerbread.

So then we had to peel, core and dice the pears, and then stew them with a little water, while adding small amounts of vinegar to keep it bubbling (we used apple vinegar, but wine vinegar would be best). Once the fruits were soft, I added crushed gingerbread cookies that had been left over from last Christmas. The recipe calls for "honey cake" and then various spices, but the gingerbread already contained honey and the same spices (cinnamon, cloves, pepper, ginger and cardamom). After this pear-and-gingerbread mixture had cooked down to a homogenous paste (you can hasten the process with a blender) and cooled down, there remained only one more step: combining it with the mustard paste in roughly equal proportion. We also added a pinch of turmeric to give our mustard the familiar mustard-yellow colour (no cheating here; mustards have been dyed yellow with turmeric for ages). We did wait a little for the flavours to develop, but we didn't wait for the mustard to ferment.

And what about the ketchup? For this , I picked an early-19th-century English recipe which has the characteristics of a transition period in ketchup history: it already contained tomatoes, but still contained fish. The fish, in this case, was anchovies.

The original recipe says you should first cure the tomatoes in a frightening amount of salt. We opted for a quicker solution using much less salt (actually, no salt at all except the heavily salted anchovies) and with vinegar providing the tart taste. We started by sautéing a few shallots in oil. Then we added three little jars of anchovies; the smell that wafted then in the air made all dogs in the neighbourhood bark like crazy. Once the fish was cooked down to a paste, we added some peeled tomatoes and then stewed a little more, while seasoning the mixture with allspice, nutmeg, ginger and coriander, as well as (this was my own idea) lovage and summer savoury. And, to make our ketchup at least a little more like the ketchup we're used to, we sweetened it with a ''soupçon'' of sugar. One thing we didn't have was cochineal, so we couldn't dye our ketchup red and had to settle for the orangish tinge typical for tomato soup. Once the whole thing cooled down, it was blended and enriched (according to the original recipe) with a glass of brandy.