Kraut & about The renown of Morse’s Sauerkraut is growing and so is its menu

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The morning sun streams through the windows of the Bavarian Pantry at Morse’s Sauerkraut in Waldoboro, illuminating jars of chanterelles, heavy loaves of rye bread speckled with caraway seeds, crocks of pickles, bottled mustards and airtight packages of peppered bacon. Aged 40-pound wheels of cheese, tender slabs of Black Forest ham, and savory liverwurst lure visitors toward the deli, where tasty-looking German delights beckon.

A distinct, slightly vinegary smell fills the air – it’s the aroma of sauerkraut, which sits humbly in the deli case, waiting to be scooped up and taken home. But don’t let its appearance fool you – the flavor is heady and fresh, as a hand-painted antique sign on the wall will attest:

We grow our cabbage round and firm

and in them you can’t find a worm

we chop them fine and pack them loose

and into them we put the juice

you can look this old world in and out

but you can’t beat Morse’s sauerkraut

The pantry, with its selection of hard-to-find imports, is a recent addition. So is the tiny German restaurant, with its high-backed booths and castle-like interior. But the kraut is

not. Since 1918, Morse’s has fed the cravings of cabbage-lovers near and far with its well-guarded recipe, which is at once simple and immensely complex. The kraut has three ingredients: shredded cabbage, salt, and sugar, the quantities of which are a secret. But it’s the alchemy that takes place in the curing room that gives it character.

“It’s not like baking a cake. It takes 21 days to find out how it turns out,” said David Swetnam, who bought Morse’s with his wife, Jacquelyn Sawyer, four years ago. “There are a lot of other factors that will contribute to the failure or success of the sauerkraut. The best you can do is set up the proper set of circumstances.”

Those circumstances involve putting the right proportions of said ingredients into wood and plastic barrels, which are later covered with wood planks weighted down with rocks, and letting the mixture ferment for exactly three weeks. The curing room, which is like a sparkling clean but somewhat smelly garage, is cool but not cold, and after a few days, a frothy, almost mossy cap of foam starts to form atop the barrels. This is when the fun begins.

Unlike store-bought kraut, Morse’s is made and sold under continuous fermentation. It has no preservatives, and thus is ever-changing in flavor. The canned, bottled or bagged kraut that you find at the grocery will stay good for quite a while, whereas Morse’s will eventually go bad. But when it’s good, it’s really, really good.

“You actually enjoy a whole spectrum of flavors,” Sawyer said during a brief reprieve from the lunchtime rush. “It continues to age. It continues to develop.”

This is a good thing for cabbage connoisseurs and a bad thing for the UPS guy, because the byproduct of all this activity is carbon dioxide. If the temperature in the delivery truck rises, the containers in which the kraut is being shipped will pop open, or, even worse, explode.

“We’re committed to not pasteurizing,” Swetnam said. “We want to deliver it in its most healthful, tasty form.”

Which is why the couple has no plans to expand their operation much beyond Maine. They sell the kraut in grocery and specialty stores as far north as Bucksport and Ellsworth (they plan to expand into the Bangor area this fall), and they ship the kraut to loyal out-of-state customers. But they have no desire to become the next Libby’s.

“We don’t have designs on making this a really big company,” Swetnam said. “You can only make so much quality sauerkraut by hand.”

Still, they make much more than the Morse family did. In the beginning, Virgil Morse would plant 7 acres of cabbage in the spring, harvest it in the fall, and cure it for 21 days. When it was done, he would make an announcement: “Kraut’s ready.” His son, Virgil Jr., and later his daughter-in-law, Ethelyn Morse, continued the tradition, and each fall, a tiny, cryptic ad would appear in the local paper. “Kraut’s Ready” was all it said – no address, no phone number, no mention of Morse’s. And the locals would come out in droves.

“There’s a lot of anticipation starting in early September for the kraut,” Swetnam said. “It’s a harbinger of the fall and Oktoberfest season. In the early days, sauerkraut and pickles were the only vegetables you had over the winter. This idea of the harvest and preserving the harvest was a fundamental part of Morse’s.”

It still is, but improved cold-storage techniques have allowed Swetnam and Sawyer to make sauerkraut almost year-round. There’s a bit of a break in the summer, during which they make sour garlic and sour mustard pickles. But the fresh kraut isn’t such a limited commodity anymore.

“Mrs. Morse would always say, ‘You’ve gotta keep ’em hungry for the fall,'” Swetnam said. “It was always seasonal. She thought it would lose some of its cachet if it was always available.”

It hasn’t. In fact, demand has gone up. The mailing list at Morse’s has swelled to 30,000 people, but the shop is so busy, they haven’t found time to print and send a new brochure. Nor have they been able to take a trip to Germany to find out what their counterparts there are doing. It wasn’t what they expected when they moved to Maine from Washington state a little more than four years ago, but they aren’t complaining.

Swetnam and Sawyer both had ties to Maine, and they initially dreamed of opening a business in Washington County, but the market wasn’t right. Swetnam returned five years ago to visit elderly relatives in the Warren area, and found an unusual ad in the local paper.

“Down at the bottom of the list, being quietly marketed, was Morse’s Sauerkraut,” Swetnam said. “I had to see it. There’s this funky, quirky little business.”

Ethelyn Morse had run Morse’s with her grandson until she was in her 80s. Her friend Leon Payne took over in the ’90s as a favor to the family, and several years later he sold it. The new owner lasted a year, and then Morse’s was back in Payne’s hands again. He wanted to retire, so he put it up for sale again, and Swetnam and Sawyer moved in.

Both had a diverse range of experience in retail – from art dealing to pest control – so sauerkraut wasn’t too big of a stretch. They inherited the recipe, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“We drove across the country in a motor home with our four hairless dogs from Peru, pulled out front, opened the doors and started making sauerkraut the very next day,” Swetnam recalled. “Twenty-one days later, we made the announcement: Kraut’s ready.”

And so were the regulars. They showed up in droves – over the course of several weeks, thousands of people passed through the doors. They were lined up outside through Christmastime. And they came from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire. They weren’t up for a vacation. They drove up, bought their sauerkraut, turned around and went home.

“Very seldom do you have the opportunity to acquire a business with such longevity,” Swetnam said. “This one came readymade with it. It just needed new energy and someone to push the walls out a little bit.”

And push they did. One thing they noticed is that people “from away” looked a little disappointed that there wasn’t more there. At the time, it was a simple shop that sold sauerkraut, homemade beet-horseradish relish, Maine-made jams and jellies and dry beans. The couple added German specialty foods to complement the sauerkraut, and suddenly, the local German population started coming out of the woodwork to do their shopping. They requested items, and Morse’s selection – as well as its reputation – grew.

So did its menu. Though neither had restaurant experience, Swetnam and Sawyer saw a void. People would show up hungry, so they started to offer Reuben sandwiches and kraut dogs. Soon, they started to offer traditional German favorites such as sauerbraten, sausage platters with bratwurst, red cabbage with apple, weiner schnitzel, homemade pierogies, beef rouladen, and, of course, Morse’s signature sauerkraut.

“If you’re a foodie-type person, you needn’t go any further than to taste it,” Swetnam said. “It’s so vastly different from store-bought sauerkraut. It’s so fresh and the taste is so natural.”

Though many things have changed at Morse’s since 1918, the kraut is sacrosanct. It lures in foodies and nonfoodies, farmers and gourmet cooks, yacht captains and mechanics, from around the corner and across the country. Portland chef Sam Hayward sang its praises in a recent New York Times article. The Slow Food movement, which has a firm foothold in Midcoast Maine, has embraced the kraut as well. But Sawyer and Swetman aren’t in business for the accolades.

“Jackie and I view this as being akin to a living museum – one of the last of these places. We just try not to let people down,” Swetman said. “We feel a great deal of duty and responsibility. It’s a much-valued part of old Maine by the regular customers, and there would be an awful lot of disappointment if this place were to fold up and close.”

Judging by the recent reaction of a noontime customer, that won’t happen anytime soon.

“Wonderful! Wonderful! I love it,” a woman exclaimed when Sawyer asked her if she liked her lunch of sausage on a bed of warmed kraut. “Marvelous! Oh, a feast!”

Morse’s Sauerkraut is located on Route 220 in Waldoboro. Hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (till 5 p.m. in the restaurant) seven days a week. For information, call (866) 832-5569 or e-mail morses@midcoast.com. Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.