National Mustard Museum
Near Madison, Wisconsin
In Middleton, Wisconsin, just west of Madison, you will find a museum dedicated entirely to mustard. The National Mustard Museum was the idea of Barry Levenson, a former Assistant Attorney General of Wisconsin, who began his mustard collection in nineteen eighty-six under somewhat unusual circumstances. Despondent after the Boston Red Sox lost the World Series, Levenson wandered the aisles of an all-night grocery store and heard, as he later described it, a voice from the condiment aisle saying: if you collect us, they will come. He bought a dozen jars that night and never stopped.
The museum opened in Mount Horeb in nineteen ninety-two and moved to Middleton in two thousand nine. Today it houses more than six thousand mustards from more than seventy countries, along with mustard memorabilia, historical exhibits, and an actual shop. It is free to enter and entirely earnest about its subject.
