Poppy and Prune

One Passover a few years back, I took it upon myself to try one of the most shtetl-tastic foods out there: the black radish.

It’s rarely found in the United States today aside from occasional appearances around Passover and Rosh Hashanah, but the black radish is the most ancient type of radish, as well as the variety most consumed throughout human history. Bigger and rounder than your garden variety red radish, with a black exterior and (disappointingly, at least to me), a creamy white interior, these radishes were one of the primary foods eaten by the slaves who built the pyramids.

While that’s a nifty bit of Passover trivia, more relevant here is the fact that due to its ability to withstand long-term winter storage, the black radish was, for much of the year, one of the few vegetables available to northeastern Europeans—including many Ashkenazi Jews.

According to Gil Marks, black radish and black bread constituted a common dinner for the poor, and a characteristic dish among Jews in Lithuania, northern Poland, and Ukraine was grated black radish, schmaltz, onion, salt, and pepper, sometimes raw and sometimes sautéed, known as schvartze retach mit schmaltz or simply retachlich. The humble black radish was sometimes added to tzimmes, or even cooked with honey and ginger into preserves for a Passover treat—weird, right?

I did consider those preserves, but in the end I settled on a tamer-sounding grated black radish salad recipe from Gil Marks’ Olive Trees and Honey.

It may have been tame, but reader, I did not like this salad, not one bit. It was bitter. It was coarse. It was, in a word, disgusting (apologies to any black radish fans among you). I couldn’t make it through more than a couple bites, and much to my shame (especially now) I’m pretty sure most of it ended up in the trash.

In most respects, then, we can conclude that my black radish experiment was a big fat fail. In one way, though, it was a success: it really, truly made me grateful to live in a world where I wasn’t obligated to eat this monstrosity of a vegetable on the regular. It made me appreciate the abundance and variety of food we have (or had, as of approximately two weeks ago) at our fingertips, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

I don’t mean to say this thought had never crossed my mind. If you’ve spent even five minutes in the food history world and haven’t come to this conclusion, you’re probably doing it wrong. No, I’ve thought plenty about how lucky I am to be able to eat more or less whatever I want, whenever I want, not to have to subsist on a sad diet of black bread, onions, schmaltz, and, yes, black radishes, with an occasional herring thrown in for good measure. At one point I even thought about doing some sort of shtetl challenge—kind of like the food stamp challenge, but where I emulate the sort of diet I imagine my sad forebears must have subsisted on in Ye Olde Country for a couple of days.

But there’s nothing like a pungent shred of black radish on your tongue to make you really feel it.

That, or a pandemic.

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