L ifestyle /C ulture
The Jewish History of Gold’s Horseradish
FOOD STEPHANIE GANZ | JTA.ORG
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 apart-
ment, 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 freshly peeled root
in front of a busy store; but when
he got into a dispute that turned
physical with the store owner,
he landed in jail and called on
Hyman to bail him out. Hyman’s
compensation was his cousin’s
horseradish grinder.

Having recently lost their
business selling and repairing
radios, the Golds were all in
on horseradish, which Hyman
sold, four jars at a time, to shops
and delis in the neighborhood.

Horseradish is a staple of
the Passover seder because it
has come to represent maror,
bitter herbs, which symbolize
the suffering of the Jewish
slaves in Egypt. The Golds
were gambling on one thing:
that the predominantly Jewish
families in the area would
prefer for someone else to do
the crying over their horse-
radish for the seder. That bet
paid off, with four generations
of Golds eventually working
for the family business.

As word of Gold’s Horseradish
grew, Hyman employed his three
sons — Morris, Manny and
Herbert — to deliver bottles on
their bicycles and via the train.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM One brother would wait at each
stop while the third would stay
on the train, shuttling bottles
back and forth, to avoid paying
multiple fares. Horseradish
engulfed the Gold household.

The family grew the galloping
roots, weed-like and unruly, in
their backyard, and they would
fill the bathtub with the dirt-en-
crusted horseradish roots to
wash them. The air in the small
apartment was constantly tinged
with the eye-watering fumes,
which wafted from the open
window to the streets below.

As they outgrew their home
operation, the Golds moved the
business to 4127 18th Ave. in
Brooklyn, where, over the next
two decades, they introduced
automation that allowed them
to speed up production and
introduce new products, like
borscht in 1948. According to
third-generation owner Marcus
Gold, when they brought in a
filling machine to fill the jars,
his grandmother Tillie, who
had filled jars by hand using a
small funnel, in classic bubbe
fashion, remarked, “Why did
you buy a filling machine? I’m
a filling machine!”
The family were used to
doing all the work themselves
— and by hand. At 6 years
old, Marcus Gold remembers
marking the boxes of beet
horseradish with a fat red
marker, his first task for the
family business. As a teen in
the 1960s, around the holidays
especially, he and his cousins
would be called in whenever
someone didn’t show up to
work. The long days started at 7
a.m. and went on nonstop with
the brisk pace of an assembly
line in motion. “We always
made sure we had enough to
be used for the next couple of
days, but we didn’t stock up.

So when the production list
was made, we had to get to that
amount made,” he recalls.

By the mid-1970s, the third
Gold’s generation — Steven,
Neil, Howard and Marc —
took over under the leadership
of their fathers, who were
mourning the loss, in 1975, of
their mother, Tillie. Over the
next two decades, the brothers
and cousins worked together
to make every major decision
for the brand, continuing to
grow the product line and, in
1994, relocating to Hempstead,
New York, in the western part
of Long Island. Eventually,
Steven’s daughter Melissa and
Marc’s son Shaun joined the
team, marking the fourth
generation to contribute to the
family business.

It was Marcus Gold’s father,
Morris, who instilled in him
the importance of advertising.

Morris was responsible for intro-
ducing Gold’s jingle, “If it’s gotta
taste great, it’s gotta have Gold’s,”
punctuated by the ringing
of a bell. From the business’s
earliest days, Morris knew that
name recognition mattered, so
JEWISH EXPONENT
he brought signs and window
decals for store owners to
display, letting shoppers know
that their store carried Gold’s
products. “Advertising gave
the appearance that you were
bigger than you really were,”
says Gold. In the early 1950s,
Gold’s hosted Miss Horseradish
contests to raise brand aware-
ness. Gold’s also bought ad
space in Haggadahs produced by
local grocery chains to further
emphasize the connection to the
seder table.

This insistence on name
recognition stuck with Gold, an
avid baseball fan and the founder
of the Mets Fan Club. After the
business made its final move
to Hempstead, New York, and
began manufacturing specialty
mustard, Gold saw an oppor-
tunity to get their mustard into
Shea Stadium. It was the chance
of a lifetime for Gold, and after
convincing the rest of his family
(which required securing Mike
Piazza to do a Gold’s bobble head
doll promo), the brand began its
conquest of baseball stadiums.

To this day, Gold’s is the go-to
condiment brand for stadiums
around the country.

In 2015, the Golds sold the
brand to LaSalle Capital, a
Chicago-based investment firm.

In early 2021, that company
announced the closure of the
Hempstead factory, but a repre-
sentative from the company
says production will continue
undisturbed. Though Gold’s is
no longer made in Brooklyn,
memories of the brand linger,
in Brooklyn and beyond, any
time someone opens a jar of
horseradish for a Bloody Mary
or their Passover seder. l
This article originally appeared on
The Nosher.

AUGUST 19, 2021
25