The Jewish history of Gold's Horseradish

If you happened to be walking down the 800 block of Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn in the 1930s, you might have caught a whiff of horseradish in the air. From their Brooklyn apartment, two Jewish immigrants - Hyman and Tillie Gold, from Ukraine and Romania, respectively - were peeling the pungent roots at their kitchen table, filling bottles of prepared horseradish by hand and labeling them with homemade labels and paste made from flour and water.

The couple came into the horseradish business almost by accident. Hyman's cousin worked on the sidewalk in Borough Park, Brooklyn, peddling the fre...