By the time you get this far south, everybody’s a Cardinals fan and loves to talk about Whitey Herzog. They also love to talk about horseradish. They make Bloody Marys with horseradish. They put it in carrot cake. They put it in hot sauce for crab Rangoon. This is Collinsville, Illinois, self-proclaimed horseradish capital of the world, the town responsible for approximately two-thirds of the country’s entire horseradish supply.
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Teenage mothers with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles buttons and Simpsons T-shirts wheeled their children across a little wooden bridge and up a grassy hill toward the main tents. Several children, all prepared for the Little Miss Horseradish pageant, were dressed up like horseradish roots, their faces protruding from clumps of tangled, dangling roots. People were selling “Horseradish Now!” T-shirts, and buttons and bumper stickers that announced “Horseradish: A Root Awakening.”
One small boy who was dressed in a Roy Rogers cowboy shirt said, “I want some horseradish, Mommy,” and tugged on the seat of her Wranglers. His mother snapped “Don’t y’all touch me there,” and swatted his head with a rolled-up newspaper.
“Why do they call it horseradish?” somebody asked.
Under the main tent a guy with a beige tam and kelly green golf pants was smacking his lips as he sampled horseradish dishes for the recipe contest. The contestants, middle-aged women with big purses clunking against their hips, watched nervously. Would it be the Polish sausage sauerkraut casserole? The horseradish potatoes? The grilled horseradish mushrooms? Or the chicken with horseradish cream? The festival’s organizers had hoped for a horseradish pizza or a horseradish cola, but no cook was brave enough to give those a shot. The judge declared a draw among the six entries.
“How much them things weigh?” asked a third.
Over by the baseball diamond a fat, pimply teenager and his brother were sitting on a bench discussing the horseradish-eating contest that was about to start. Whoever ate the most hot dogs strewn with horseradish in 30 seconds would be declared the winner.
