Every spring, when the Easter-Passover season rolls around, Hannah Benoit is flooded with memories of growing up in the 18th-century Capt. Thompson homestead on Beach Street, where her father’s plentiful horseradish crop filled the sprawling back garden.
This Easter, Benoit, a former Westerly resident who has worked for decades as a journalist, writer and editor, decided to share some of those memories in “A Nothing Sandwich with All the Trimmings: Stories of Food and Family, with 90-Plus Heirloom Recipes,” her soon-to-be-published memoir.
One of the chapters of the book centers on two food traditions that “enlivened our family’s Easter celebration year after year: kielbasa and homemade horseradish,” Benoit said recently on the telephone from her home in Boston’s Dorchester section while discussing her memoir.
Also a watercolor artist, Benoit has included her art work in the book, which sort of began, she said, when she and her sister, Cordalie, asked their German grandmother to write down some of her “old world” recipes for her signature dishes, like her potato salad.
Her grandmother was of the “a little of this and a little of that” school of cooking, and didn’t use recipes, Benoit recalled with a laugh.
“So many memories revolve around food,” Benoit said. “Sensory memories … happy memories … memories that bring you back.”
Benoit said she learned her love of food and cooking from her mother, the late Gertrude M. Langheld Benoit, an accomplished chef, businesswoman, cookbook author and longtime Sun columnist who ran a catering business and ran several popular restaurants — including Gert’s Country Kitchen at the Fantastic Umbrella Factory — and the lunch concession at the Watch Hill Yacht Club.
Benoit, who graduated from Westerly High School in 1969 before heading off to Boston University, said her book “tells the story of my life through food, and many of the essays are related to Westerly, where my parents, Gert and Richard Benoit, lived for 40 years.”
The Beach Street house — the big yellow farmhouse across from the Pawcatuck River — remains in the family, she said. Cordalie and her husband David live there now, she said, “and the horseradish patch still thrives.”
“The crop is still there,” said Benoit with a laugh.
Her parents bought the house — which was unoccupied, in need of paint and full of broken windows — for $9,000 in 1963, she said.
“On winter weekends we would all pile into the car and drive to Westerly to ‘fix up’ the house,” she said, which for her parents was “a marathon of scrubbing, scraping, plastering, painting and wallpapering.”
At the time, they lived in Colchester, Connecticut, “on an in-town lot with a tiny backyard.”
“In Westerly, we had three acres, a barn, two sheds, and a three-seater outhouse,” Benoit writes. “For me and my five siblings, coming to Westerly was like flinging open the windows on a warm spring day. After five summers, we moved there year-round. Dad commuted to work at his environmental consulting business in Norwich, and Mom’s catering business thrived in the summertime, when seasonal residents of Watch Hill and Stonington hosted various gatherings.”
Throughout her childhood years, she said, the horseradish was always ready by Easter, ready to serve alongside the kielbasa, the “garlicky smoked Polish sausage,” which held a prominent spot on the Benoit family’s holiday dinner table.
The kielbasa “was a fixture of that springtime feast. The horseradish was so hot and pungent that it stung your sinuses. Dad added cooked beets to the mix, turning the colorless mush a gorgeous magenta that upstaged the dyed Easter eggs,” Benoit writes.
“For some 40 years, making horseradish was one of my father’s spring rituals at our home on Beach Street,” Benoit writes in her memoir. “On the sloping land between the house and barn, Mom and Dad created a sprawling garden for vegetables, daylilies, and irises. Horseradish was one of Dad’s prized crops, and every spring he transformed the root into a spicy sauce and put it up in jars.
“My father delighted in kielbasa. Dad had lost his mother, née Frances Krukowski, at a tender age (both his and hers). Though his mother was gone, his Polish roots ran deep, and family food traditions are tenacious. Kielbasa held on.
“At Easter,” she continues, “Dad would ask my mother’s Aunt Hannah, who lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, to stop at a local company called Chicopee Provision to pick up some of their handmade Blue Seal kielbasa before heading down to Westerly. I didn’t much care for kielbasa then, but now I love it, though it’s a guilty pleasure (as is any sausage, I suppose). The Chicopee Provision Company, a family business founded in 1920 as the Sitarz Manufacturing Company, still makes its renowned kielbasa.”
While recipes abound for “various stews and casseroles made with kielbasa,” Benoit says she prefers “mine sliced thick, browned in butter, and served with homemade horseradish — especially at Easter dinner.”
“Horseradish also figures in the springtime Passover Seder,” Benoit writes, “serving as the requisite ‘bitter herb’ for the meal.”
Quoting the website of Chosen People Ministries, Benoit writes that “Horseradish … completely overpowers the senses when you eat it on a small piece of matzah:
According to Jewish tradition, one must eat enough bitter herbs (maror in Hebrew) to bring tears to the eyes. The tears and the bitter herbs remind each Seder participant how the great affliction the Jewish people endured brought tears to their eyes.
“Even a whiff of my father’s horseradish could bring tears to one’s eyes,” Benoit writes. “It married well with hard-boiled eggs.
“Commercial and home chefs make horseradish sauce from the ground root of the plant, vinegar, and sometimes a little sugar,” she writes in her book. “The Horseradish Information Council (yes, there is one) reports that 60 percent of the world’s crop is grown in and around Collinsville, Illinois, where German immigrants settled in the late 1800s.
“The council notes that the root’s kick comes from isothiocyanate, ‘a volatile compound that, when oxidized by air and saliva, generates the ‘heat’ that some people claim clears out their sinuses,’ and that this bite is ‘almost absent until [the horseradish] is grated or ground. During this process, as the root cells are crushed, isothiocyanates are released. Vinegar stops this reaction and stabilizes the flavor. For milder horseradish, vinegar is added immediately.’
“I guess Dad took his time in adding the vinegar,” she writes, “because his horseradish was anything but mild. Some people couldn’t manage more than a tiny taste, others couldn’t stand it, but our Great-aunt Hannah loved it, and always took a jar home on Easter Sunday.”
Benoit, who works as an editor at “Education Next,” an education policy journal, is the mother of a daughter, Emelia Benoit-Lavelle, and a son, Mischa Benoit-Lavelle. She said she hopes her book will be ready for publication within the next few months.