Trueheart. And Mary Clayton.

I’m Mary Clayton. My mother is Trueheart. The recipe is hers.

Growing up in Birmingham, Trueheart kept the house stocked with her hot mustard. It was on the table at Sunday lunch and on the side of every ham biscuit I can remember. It traveled to friends’ houses in jelly jars, given by way of saying thank you. My mother spreads it, dips it, and dresses her greens with it. That’s how I learned what to do with it — by watching what she did with it.

In March 2020 my work as a freelance photo stylist stopped. The kitchen filled the space the studio used to. I started making my mother’s mustard at home, in batches, the way she taught me. Friends asked for jars. Then their friends asked. By the end of that summer the requests had stopped feeling like favors. The recipe wanted to be a business, and I let it.

I named the company after my mother. Trueheart — truly, that is my mom’s real name. She is 92. She is still in the kitchen with me. She is the end-all-be-all when it comes to quality control: every batch goes through her, and nothing ships unless she nods.

True’s lives on the shelves of butchers and florists, gift-shop owners and neighborhood grocers, in towns where people know each other’s names. The shopkeepers chose us first. Southern Living wrote about us. Birmingham Home & Garden, Taste of the South, and others followed. None of that happened because we paid for it. It happened because somebody opened a jar and decided their table needed it.

The recipe is older than the company. The label is the one I designed at our kitchen table. Everything you find on this site — the recipes, the curators, the photographs — came from following Trueheart around with a notebook and a camera and writing down what I saw.