Xanthe Clay Meet the condiment king on a mission to preserve our culinary heritage

Guy Tullberg, boss of Tracklements, is as keen as mustard to preserve Britain’s culinary heritage, as Xanthe Clay discovers

What will be on your Christmas table? For most of us, it’ll be a turkey, or maybe a goose, perhaps a piece of roast beef. Vegetables, roast potatoes, gravy, of course. But what will really mark it out as a great British Christmas dinner are the condiments. Whether it is bread sauce, which has roots in medieval cooking, or cranberry, which speaks of our continuing links with North America, there’s significance to our sauces.

It’s that history of British sauces and relishes that fascinates Guy Tullberg, the ebullient 6ft 6in managing director of mustard maker Tracklements, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year.

Fittingly, the roots of the business lie in our national habit of making the best of a bad job.

Tullberg’s father, William, who worked for the now defunct sausage maker Harris of Calne, started making his own mustard for the sausage-andbeer parties he hosted at home because, Guy tells me cheerfully, “the bangers tasted so bad; the quality of sausages in the 1960s wasn’t always great”.

At the time, there was no English wholegrain mustard available to buy, but William collected historical cookery books and found a recipe by John Evelyn, the 17th-century diarist.

Intrigued, he set about making it and, lacking the “cannon-bullet” suggested in the recipe, roped in a manual coffee grinder to crush the mustard seeds. The first taste was not a success.

But, like that other great British condiment Worcestershire sauce, he discovered it needed time to develop. “If you leave it for five to seven days in barrel, which is what we still do now, it starts to take on the right flavour,” vour,” Guy says.

In 1970, William iam left the sausage business ss and set up Maslen’s restaurant taurant in Calne, Wiltshire. shire. Urchfont Mustard, tard, as he named the Evelyn-inspired d concoction, became a staple, ple, including on n soused mackerels, which Guy, by now aged s e ve n and roped in on school holidays to help in the kitchen, was in charge of gutting and filleting. Soon, people were asking to buy the mustard in jars to take away, and production increased in a room at the back of the restaurant kitchen.

Guy’s school career was bumpy, ending at 16 with “a night in the cells and being collected the following day by my parents”. He spent a few years working in the City, and in the United States, before joining the nascent business properly in his mid mid- 20s, on a sixmonth trial, which never ended. Word was sprea spreading about the mustards, as w well as the fruit jellies his fat father had started making. I It was good timing. Brit British food was at last eme emerging from the doldr doldrums, spearhead headed by cheese p pioneer Neal’s Y Ya rd D a i r y, which was an early stockist. The range was named Wiltshire Tracklements, and then simply Tracklem ments, a term picked up from Tullberg’s Lincolnshire grandmother. They opened a factory in Sherston and Guy took to the road, driving from town to town selling to delis and butchers.

The turning point came in 1998, when Clarissa Dickson Wright and Henrietta Green started the first producers’ market in London’s Borough Market, then a declining wholesale hub. “We sold hundreds and hundreds of jars in those two days. I’d never seen anything like it,” recalls Guy. “That was when we realised there was pent-up demand for something different and better.”

The rest, as they say, is food history. The business now employs 60 people and turns out 15,000 jars a day. But in other ways, little has changed. William is 88 and still involved. “He’ll always tell me if something is not right, but in a

Guy Tullberg, MD of Tracklements, has helped to revive forgotten condiments

very gentle way,” his son tells me. “When I showed him around the new factory in Malmesbury, he said, ‘ it’s just the same, but bigger’. I was very proud.”

They still run one shift a day, five days a week. As Guy says: “We want people to have a life.”

When making something new, Tracklements looks back, not forward. “You won’t find us making a mint and balsamic vinegar jelly,” Guy remarks drily. And this perspective can have unforeseen advantages. Some 25 years ago, they launched the first commercial onion marmalade, and ran into conflict with Trading Standards. “They said we couldn’t sell it, as marmalade had to be made with oranges,” says Guy. “So we put together 20 pages of historical evidence as to why it was possible to call it onion marmalade.” It became a bestseller and launched a raft of imitators.

Tracklements has a history of reviving forgotten condiments. It is one of the few large-scale producers not just of crabapple jelly, but also one made with medlars. These are an ugly brown fruit (their nickname was “dog’s a---”) mentioned by Chaucer and Shakespeare, with a flavour between an apple and a date. Locals bring in the fruit from their trees, which would often otherwise go to waste, and a percentage of the price goes to charity. It’s not a big seller, admits Guy, but “it satisfies the business’s soul”.

The mustard is still made the same way, with seeds crushed in two stone grinders, although now they are mixed in barrels rather than the dustbin that William used.

Pungent wafts of mustard oil drift up when the lids are raised. “The mustard makers never seem to get colds,” muses Guy. Perhaps Evelyn was right when he said that mustard had an “incomparable effect to quicken and revive the spirits, strengthening the memory and expelling heaviness”.

Fifty years in business, Tracklements offers a steadying sense of permanence. Tastes have changed over that time, Guy says, “veering towards the sweet and now going a bit sour again; and we definitely like chilli heat more now”.

But we have stayed loyal to the old flavours: “A good pork pie or a classic cold cuts lunch, bread, butter, ham, mustard, cheese, chutney, it’s quite fine and so simple.”

For Christmas Day, the Tullberg table will have a jar of sage and apple jelly alongside the turkey. “It’s one of my… no, I’m not allowed to have favourites,” Guy backtracks quickly, like a parent caught preferring one of his children.

“But it’s day two – Boxing Day – that Tracklements come into their own: piccalilli, chutney, mustard.”

Keep the jars in the fridge, he advises, all except the fruit jellies, which tend to crystallise in the cold. And what about those lingering jars of half- eaten chutney and relish that lurk at the back for months? “I do worry about them,” admits Guy, in anxious parent mode.

“I recommend making a big stew – and where you have little remnants of chutney and relish, put them [in]. Relishes and chutneys are fruit, but we’ve cooked it, driven the water off and concentrated it. A spoonful of that in a casserole, it’s just going to add a lovely base flavour.” The spicing won’t overwhelm, he promises. “Spices add the light and shade to everything we do. Without them, it is dull, but you have to be so careful. I like that delicate balance.”

The aim of the company, Guy continues, is to “provide a small amount of joy”. “Condiments have always been a bit of a poor relation,” he says, “But they are an important part of every meal, part of our history. Take them away and things aren’t quite the same, are they?”

Exactly that: it wouldn’t be Christmas without them.

‘Spices add the light and shade to everything we do here. Without them, it is dull’