horseradish

The word horseradish first appears in English in the late 1500s. The 'horse' element is not about the animal. In sixteenth-century English, 'horse' was used as a prefix meaning 'coarse, strong, or large' — horse-mint, horse-chestnut, horse-laugh. A horse-radish was a big, rough radish, as opposed to the small, mild table radish. The compounding is purely about scale and intensity.

The plant — Armoracia rusticana — is native to southeastern Europe and western Asia. The Greeks knew it. Pliny the Elder mentioned it as Armoracia in the first century CE. Cato the Elder recommended it medicinally. But it was the Germans who turned horseradish into a culinary staple. By the 1200s, horseradish was being grated and mixed with vinegar across Germanic-speaking Europe. The English adopted the condiment and the habit, though they never grew it as enthusiastically as the Bavarians.

Horseradish's pungency comes from sinigrin, a glucosinolate that breaks down into allyl isothiocyanate when the root is grated. The same chemical is responsible for the heat in mustard and wasabi. In fact, nearly all commercial wasabi sold outside Japan is horseradish dyed green. The plants are related — both belong to the Brassicaceae family — but the flavor substitution is still a fraud, and it has been going on for decades.

Horseradish sauce is inseparable from roast beef in English cuisine. The combination was already standard by the seventeenth century. Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine uses horseradish — maror — as the bitter herb at the Passover seder. A single root serves English Sunday dinner and Jewish ritual. The plant does not know it is performing two cultural roles simultaneously.