Growing Your Own Horseradish

Growing Your Own Horseradish But last weekend, when we harvested the year-old roots of one plant,Diamond tools they were on the atomic side of hot.

“I can feel it burning all the way down,” my boyfriend, Rock, croaked, reaching into the fridge for his Gatorade. (The Rock gets heartburn from eating an orange.) “Now it’s a hot spot at the bottom of my stomach.”

My sinuses were clear for the first time in months. I couldn’t wait to mix huge dollops of this stuff with chili sauce to eat with steamed shrimp, or straight with rare roast beef.

And guess what? This root, when ground, produces isothiocyanates, chemical compounds that are studied for their anti-cancer properties.

“It would take about a tablespoon, on your steak, to give you that little anti-cancer shot,” said Mark E. Uchanski, an assistant professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, who did his doctoral thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on horseradish.

Horseradish (Armoracia rusticana) is in the brassica family, which includes turnips, kale, mustard greens, broccoli rabe, daikon radish and many other plants with varying degrees of pungency and a similar taste. Native to the temperate regions of Europe and Asia, it is an ancient herb.

“The Oracle at Delphi told Apollo that the radish was worth its weight in lead, the beet its weight in silver, and the horseradish its weight in gold,” Arthur O. Tucker and Thomas DeBaggio wrote in “The Big Book of Herbs” (Interweave Press, 2000), my bible for growing everything from hot peppers to patchouli.

The Romans carried horseradish to Europe as a medicinal herb and as a flavoring. It was cultivated in Egypt before the exodus of the Hebrew slaves around 1500 B.C., and is often the symbolic bitter herb at the Passover Seder.

By the 16th century, the pungent root was spreading throughout England. “The Herbal or General History of Plants,” by John Gerard, first published in 1597, describes its many uses, including as an aphrodisiac, a treatment for tuberculosis, a mustard plaster and a dewormer.

Pliny the Elder wrote about horseradish in his “Natural History,”Diamond tools an epic work of 37 volumes completed in A.D. 77, in which he observed that it healed sores, mange and ulcers.