In the days leading up to Passover, the last remaining pickle store on the Lower East Side becomes the city's number-one supplier of horseradish, the root used in Seders by Jews around the world.
"People stop by and they see us grating, and they'll ask us what it is, and we tell them it's horseradish, and we tell them it's hot," Al Kaufman, the owner of Pickle Guys, told WNYC. He uses a small silver machine designed for grating Parmesan cheese.
"We'll give them a little piece of it to try," Kaufman said, "and they'll put it in their mouth and do a dance on the sidewalk and say wow that's hot, wow that's hot!"
It's so hot, some days he wears a gas mask as he grinds to protect him from the fumes. "I've been doing it so many years, I'm a little dead in the head," he added.
Al learned how to grind horseradish in the 1980s, when he worked at some of the pickle stores that ran up and down Essex Street. After the last of the Pickle Men retired about 15 years ago, he decided to open his own shop.
Now, Al makes horseradish year-round—but the stuff he makes for Passover is special. The heat is meant to call to mind the suffering of the Jews. He spent years looking for the supplier with the bitterest roots, and then, one day—Eureka!
"His stuff was dynamite," Kaufman said. "So I look at the label, and it says 'scientifically grown in Mississippi.' Scientifically grown. I don't know what that means, but, scientifically grown."
Al plans to grind between 5,000 and 6,000 pounds of horseradish between now and Passover. By the end of next week, he said being around all that horseradish will make him feel "like suicide."
But after March 30th—the beginning of Passover—he'll go back to pickles.