John Shields on 'Kraut-making Day.

story and photos by ANN LOLORDO
     The Sauerkraut Stomp is underway in John Shields’ kitchen in Gertrude’s, the restaurant at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

     A young man in a Godzilla T-shirt has stepped inside a trash bag and, holding the bag around his waist, climbs into a garbage can half full of sliced cabbage and starts jumping. Up and down, side to side. “Douglas, you got it,” Shields says, to his assistant. “I’m seeing the juice.’

      In his day job, Doug Wetzel is the pastry chef at Gertrude’s. But on the Monday before Thanksgiving, he is Shields’ ally and accomplice in this homage to his grandmother’s must-have Thanksgiving side-dish and a Baltimore favorite. For the next two hours or so, about 350 pounds of carefully-sliced cabbage will be salted, tossed, dumped into clean trash bins, stomped and then carted off to a basement to ferment for five weeks.

     It’s a labor of love and a love of tradition that has Shields recreating a holiday dish that his grandmother served each year at Thanksgiving. But 500 pounds of it? No, Gertie Cleary’s grandson isn’t feeding an army at his Towson home this holiday. He’s preparing for the 7th annual Krautfest, which he holds every January in the tradition of the ancestral village of a former employee, Thomislav Niksic, a Croat whose grandmother led the yearly putting up of the kraut that kept villagers fed through winter. Gertrude’s closes for two nights while Shields and his staff serve up a sauerkraut-inspired menu to a sold-out dinner crowd.

     But back to the business at hand.

     “There are only two ingredients – cabbage and salt,”‘ says Shields.

     Heads of cabbage are cleaned, cored and cut in wedges, which Wetzel is feeding through an industrial slicer. “You don’t want to shred it,” Shields advises as another restaurant employee, John Carroll, videotapes the kraut-maker-in-chief for a segment on his TV show. “Shredding is for some types of cole slaw. But it’s not for sauerkraut.”

     Shields reaches for a large-bladed knife to demonstrate; he hand-cuts a cabbage wedge into strips about an eighth of an inch wide. Wetzel, meanwhile, is loading up plastic bins with the sliced cabbage. Shields grabs a box of kosher salt and will toss in 3 tablespoons for every five pounds of cabbage. “This is what makes the whole thing happen,” he says. “Now you’ve got the beautiful salted cabbage.”

     “What I remember as a kid was a lot of relatives were making kraut down in the basement. It wasn’t just the Germans,” Shields recalls. “The Irish, the Italians kinda got into the act. It seems to be one of the great mysteries of Baltimore of how that happened. I heard or read somewhere that H.L. Mencken said somewhere there was no self-respecting Baltimore household that didn’t have a batch of kraut brewing in the basement.

     ” Here,” he said, “there’s a big, deep affection for sauerkraut.”

     Wetzel is suiting up for his kraut-stomping stint. He grabs a clean trash bag and steps into it. The idea is to pack down the sliced cabbage in preparation for the fermentation. A clean white towel will cover the packed-down cabbage, topped by a wooden platter – never metal. A 3-gallon plastic bucket filled with water will be placed on top of the platter. “You need that pressure,” says the 58-year-old Shields.

Doug Wetzel does the stomp. (Photo by Ann LoLordo)

     The trash bins full of cabbage are then trucked to the basement of a friend where they will remain for six weeks. Every other day or so, someone will have to unpack the contraption so that any foaming residue and discolored cabbage can be skimmed off. The towel and platter will be cleaned and replaced and the kraut weighted down again with a bucket of cold water.

     “That’s called the washing of the kraut,” says Shields as he tosses another head of cabbage into the slicer. “You wash it for about five weeks and then you have sauerkraut.”

     And the boy who learned the art of making kraut in the basement of his grandmother’s house at 25th and Greenmount will prepare to host more than 200 people for an evening of sour beef and noodles, charcuterie, pork meatballs and kraut, stuffed cabbage and a whole lot more in the restaurant named in her honor.