Grow up around Eau Claire and you hear some tall tales about Huntsinger Farms and Silver Spring Gardens: that Eau Claire County grows 80 percent (or some other outrageous fraction) of the horseradish in America (or the world); that Huntsinger started his business door-to-door like a Horatio Alger hero; that he discovered the Silver Springs formula by accident, etc. So what’s the deal? What’s fact, what’s fiction?

There’s an element of truth to the door-to-door story. Huntsinger didn’t exactly start out selling his horseradish that way, but he did get some kids to do just that. Ellis Huntsinger’s parents were truck farmers (like today’s farmers market vendors). After Ellis graduated high school in 1910, he got a job as a salesman. Made a good living until the Great Depression hit in 1929. He lost his job and returned to Eau Claire with his wife and two kids.

At that time, 80 years ago, people often had small patches of horseradish in their gardens, the same way many people still have patches of rhubarb. Horseradish was an inspired idea for a truck gardener, because you can harvest in the fall and have money coming in winter as well as summer. Huntsinger planted half an acre, cleaned out an abandoned chicken house for a processing plant, bought a hand grinder, and went into business.

“I tried to sell through the groceries,” he told Farm Quarterly back in 1957, “but they wanted only a half-dozen bottles or so because the stuff wouldn’t keep long. I finally hired some boys to peddle the bottles from door to door. A five-ounce bottle sold for 15 cents and I gave the boy 5 cents. This worked out pretty well and that’s the way I sold horseradish until we got into the business on a national scale.”

Likewise, discovering the Silver Springs formula wasn’t exactly a happy accident, Nutty Professor style. But it was happy, and it was experimental.

Once you grate horseradish, it quickly loses its kick and turns dark. Its bite comes from isothiocyanate, a volatile oil a little like the oil in mustard seed. How to stabilize it? Adding vinegar helps, refrigeration helps, but until Huntsinger developed his recipe, nothing really helped. You ground it, you used it: purely local.

It’s oxidation that kills the kick, and I’m sure Huntsinger poured various liquids into his horseradish jars, seeing what would best “encase” the zingy oil seeping from the shreds. It’s a fact that one evening, he poured a spoonful of fresh cream over the contents of a jar (seemed like natural in the dairy state), stirred it, and tasted. Much smoother-tasting. He put it in the refrigerator for a few weeks along with a jar full of the raw. “When I got it out,” he recalled, “the creamed horseradish was just as strong as when I had put it in; the pure stuff was flat and tasteless.”

As for the “world’s largest,” it’s a fair claim, although the ancillary boasts tend to be outrageous. (Huntsinger doesn’t make any of those outrageous boasts itself; they’re simply urban legends. Or rural legends, I suppose.)

Huntsinger Farms has some 9,000 acres of farmland, but grows horseradish on less than a tenth of that – in any given year, say, 400-500 acres in western Wisconsin and another 300 in Minnesota. (The company rotates fields because the root crop should only be grown on a field every five to seven years, not because it wears out the soil – which it does – but because growing it any more often on a field subjects the crop to diseases caused by verticillium and fusarium: not bad for humans, but bad for the crop.) Year to year, Illinois grows something like 2,000 acres of horseradish, dwarfing Wisconsin’s output.

Nor does the U.S. grow a majority of the world’s horseradish, although we’re on top of a short list. We grow about 4,000 acres, Hungary grows about 3,000, and Canada, Austria, and Germany combine to add a little more than 2,000. All these places have one thing in common: pretty darned cold winters – important in giving horseradish its kick.

So, at most, western Wisconsin has 5 percent of the world’s horseradish acreage. Still, Silver Springs is the world’s largest single grower and processor, and one of the few “vertically integrated” horseradish companies: growing, processing, wholesaling, supplying, marketing, retailing. And, 5 percent of the world’s anything is fantastic. But Wisconsin doesn’t dominate the horseradish market the way we dominate the sphagnum moss market or the cranberry market. More like our rank in dark red kidney beans. A crop that’s also centered right here in the Chippewa Valley, by the way.