David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Ancestral Horseradish: A Passover Story

Families pass down all sorts of heirlooms from generation to generation.  One of the most important in mine is a plant.  No, it’s not a rare orchid or a prize   rose.  It’s just ordinary horseradish (Amoracia rusticana).

As far as anyone remembers, the plant originated in my grandmother’s backyard.  Before she died, I dug up a portion and it has thrived in my various vegetable plots for about forty years.  At least one of my sisters and some of my cousins also have part of this pungent perennial.

As in my grandmother’s day, each year when my family gathers for a Passover Seder, a meal that is also a retelling of the Exodus from Egypt, a piece of the plant’s root is placed in a spot of honor among other symbolic foods.  At the appropriate point in the story telling, we share pieces of this “bitter herb” symbolizing the bitterness of slavery under pharaoh.

Ramping Up for Spring & Going Wild for Leeks

It’s been called an irrational adoration, a mania, craze, hysteria, or obsession.  Sounds like a religious cult.  But these are merely terms journalists, foodies and chefs have chosen to describe the culinary passion for ramps, known also as wild leeks.  Most people here in southern New England have never heard of them, but they grow in many communities. One taste and you feel initiated into a secret society.  I’ve recently joined, and I’m hooked.

On a deeply overcast rainy day in early April, my friend Jody took me to a wide, wooded swale sandwiched between an open field and a steep rocky slope where the ledges were covered with lichen and iridescent green moss.  Under bare hardwood trees, ramps grew in thick clusters.  Flowering among them were a few Dutchman’s breeches, the tiny waxy white flowers glowing in the dim light like lantern mantles.  For such a highly prized delicacy, the ramps seemed fairly innocuous.  Just a collection of low-growing lance-shaped leaves a couple inches broad and about five inches long.

Art Where the People Are: A Treasure Trove of WPA Paintings

You don’t expect to see historically significant paintings by renowned artists when paying your taxes or pulling a building permit at town offices—at least not unless that town is Norwalk, Connecticut.   The atrium and corridors of city hall in this coastal municipality boast over thirty masterful canvasses commissioned between 1935 and 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program designed to provide jobs through public works.  About twenty other paintings hang at libraries, The Maritime Aquarium, the post office, the Norwalk Transit District, and Norwalk Community College.  Going from place to place and finding them is a treasure hunt rewarded with inspiration and a peek into a past rapidly fading from living memory.