Of Lions And Mustards

It's amazing, what kind of memories can be evoked by as little as one word. :-)

My friend Stacer is having a lot of troubles with her sinuses and allergies. And by "a lot", I mean a lot. Somewhere along the way, she mentioned that her grandmother had told her she should eat honey and horseradish every day (not at the same time, I'm sure!). Anyway, just the word "horseradish" brought back an interesting memory.

I was in Ingolstadt a. d. Donau in the autumn of '73 and my companion and I decided to just make sandwiches for lunch one day. German mustard is good, but it's not very hot. Usually. In the cupboard, we found a jar labeled "Löwensenf" (lit. "lion mustard"; the lion being the mascot of Freistaat Bayern), so we thought we'd try that. Not impressed. But, since we had opened it, we put it in the fridge after lunch.

A few days later, we did the same thing, but we hadn't bought any other mustard, so we got out the jar of Löwensenf.

I thought I'd die.

That had to be the hottest mustard I'd ever tasted in my life. We finally figured out that it was hot because we had put it in the fridge. (I remembered that Gulden's mustard used to have a slogan on the label: If you want to keep me hot, keep me cold.)

Next time we were in the store, we bought some regular mustard. :-}