The Blessings of a Black Radish: On Abundance, Scarcity, and COVID-19

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.

As I write this, I’m weathering the COVID-19 crisis in New York City, which at the moment has the dubious distinction of being the coronavirus capital of the nation, if not the world. I haven’t left my apartment in a week, and if I can help it I don’t intend to for the next several (#stayhome, people!).

Needless to say, I’ve got plenty of food stocked up. Good food. Food that I like. And yet I’m still rattled at the disruption to my food routine. I’m down to half a purple cabbage, and when I finish that off it’s goodbye to fresh vegetables for the moment (don’t worry, I have a plentiful frozen stash). Grocery shopping is usually one of my very favorite pastimes—and I haven’t been in over two weeks. I miss my salads, my fresh fruits, and above all that feeling of abundance that comes with knowing that just about anything I could wish for, food-wise, is more or less at my doorstep. I miss the days when I didn’t count up all my packets of pasta and rice and beans and oats and calculate how much I can eat if I want to make sure my stash lasts me x days.

It’s not lost on me that my black radish-eating ancestors would probably laugh at me quietly flipping out in what is undeniably a quite cushy version of social isolation, with my frozen cauliflower gnocchi and my homemade tahini granola (seriously, this is good stuff!) and my internet. And I am very much aware that I’m in no way actually experiencing food scarcity. I’m certainly not going hungry. If and when I need to venture out to the grocery store or order delivery, those options are still open to me. The food is still out there (even if the toilet paper isn’t).

Maybe this is a reality check we—or at least I—needed. Sometimes I wonder if we haven’t grown too soft, too decadent, sated with myths of endless abundance, of the world at our fingertips. After all, people survived the Holocaust—not to mention all those black radish-filled European winters—and here are so many of us (and I absolutely include myself in this) wondering how on earth we can possibly last through another month or two of social distancing.

It’s a reminder that none of this is under our control. It never really was.

And also of how truly blessed we are that, even in these dire times, we are exceedingly unlikely to ever find ourselves reduced to a diet of coarse bread and black radishes.

Source: Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (Gil Marks, 2010)