1 August 2020
Cut the mustard is an Americanism that means to meet expectations or requirements. It appears at in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. Here is an early example from Texas in the Galveston Daily News of 9 April 1891:
The Nebraska legislators ran high jinks out of the city on the night of their adjournment. They applied several coats of a carmine hue and cut the mustard all over their predecessors.
And another from Nebraska a few weeks later, in the Omaha World-Herald of 10 May 1891:
Nebraska City has two local teams this year. In the language of Shakespeare she “couldn’t cut the mustard” on a paid nine.
Mustard is, of course, the name for a number of plants in the genera Brassica and Sinapis, that are used to make the tabletop condiment. The word comes from the Anglo-Norman mustarde and makes its English appearance in the late thirteenth century. Beyond its literal meaning, mustard has long been used as a metaphor for pungency or zest. The phrase keen as mustard, meaning eager or zealous, dates to the seventeenth century.
The use of the verb to cut in the Americanism is a bit confusing to us today. But in the nineteenth century, and in some contexts still to this day, to cut can mean to outdo, to surpass. For example, there is this from the 13 April 1884 issue of The Referee:
George's performance [...] is hardly likely to be disturbed for a long time to come, unless he cuts it himself.
So, to cut the mustard is to metaphorically be zestier than the condiment.
It is frequently suggested that the phrase is a variation on pass muster, originally a military expression meaning to pass an inspection, but there are no examples of cut muster meaning to surpass or outdo. So, this explanation doesn’t cut the mustard.
Sources:
Galveston Daily News (Texas), 9 April 1891, 4. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Nebraska Ball Notes.” Omaha World-Herald, 10 May 1891, 10. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989. s.v. cut, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2003, s.v. mustard, n. and adj.