The leaves of Cochlearia armoracia rusticana are like those of its cousin, the radish, but bigger. Its name may once have been "harsh radish" to reflect that this member of the mustard family is much more powerful than a mere radish. The root, when grated or ground, can bring tears to your eyes while helping cure your cold or bronchitis, thanks to the antibiotic isothiocyanate oils that are released. Horseradish has been known and loved for thousands of years.
When I was about eight years old my family bought an unfinished house outside of Seattle, Washington. The outside walls were finished and the roof was in place, so the house was sealed against the weather, and all of the plumbing and wiring was done, but the inside walls and floors had not been done. My father finished the interior of the house and built a garage from scratch, then added exterior walls and terraces.
The house was lower than the road that passed by, Des Moines Way, and the yard behind the house continued to slope down to a swampy area. Beyond the small swamp was a wooded area and beyond that, we were told, was a river; we were not permitted to go through the woods to the river because of the distance involved. The slope behind the house was terraced for growing strawberries. At the corner of the top of the terraces were two patches of plants that we found growing there when we moved in. One was rhubarb, which contributed to many pies and much sauce. The other was horseradish.
Several times each year, my father would dig up a root from the horseradish patch, wash it off, and peel it, then set up the meat grinder in the kitchen. The rest of us would find a reason to be elsewhere, usually outside. The fumes from the fresh horseradish being ground were very irritating and would bring tears to our eyes. I'm not sure how my father could stand it. But the resulting paste, mixed with a bit of vinegar and spread on medium rare roast beef, was divine.
Four decades later, when I became diabetic, horseradish became important to me for another reason: a component of horseradish reacts chemically to the sugar glucose, the sugar that causes diabetics so much trouble. It reacts specifically to glucose and to nothing else and the reaction is in direct proportion to the quantity of glucose present. This makes it possible to measure the amount of glucose in so complex a substance as human blood.
In 1990, when I first started testing my own blood sugar levels, I simply used test strips that would change color to indicate the amount of glucose present. They were large and expensive. The area for the blood sample needed so much blood that we usually split each strip into several smaller ones, making testing cheaper as well as requiring less blood. We would poke a finger tip and milk out the required large drop of blood, then time the forty seconds of exposure necessary, wipe off the blood, wait twenty seconds more, then visually compare the strip against a chart to guess how much sugar was in our blood. It was pretty crude.
The first improvement was a machine that would read the color of the test strip for me. The test strip turned some shade of blue. A red or infrared light was used to measure its color. The new test strips were smaller but we could no longer split them, so it wound up costing more and requiring more blood. I only had to wait thirty seconds before wiping off the blood, with the machine beeping to tell me when the thirty seconds were up, then I could insert the strip in the machine immediately and a numeric value would show up about fifteen seconds later. The machine needed to be disassembled and cleaned frequently, as dirty optics would give low readings, and the batteries had disappointingly short lives.
The next improvement was an astonishingly simple one: someone realized that with a transparent test strip the color could be read from the back of the test patch instead of the front and the user wouldn't have to wipe off the blood or clean the optics. The test patch was made smaller at the same time, so the new machine required less blood.
Then they eliminated the optics altogether. The chemical reaction between glucose and horseradish is also an electrical reaction and can be detected as a change in resistance to an electrical flow through the sample. The test strip now has three electrical connections for the measurement. The amount of blood required is microscopic compared to those old visual tests of only a decade ago. The results are available in only fifteen seconds. The electrical measurement is said to be at least as accurate as the various optical measurements.
So as I spread the mixture of beets and horseradish on my braunschweiger sandwich I am doubly thankful for horseradish.
© Copyright 2001, James E. Henderson (WordJames). All rights reserved.