THE SAUSAGE MEISTER
WITH HIS LINK TO OLD WORLD WAYS, FERDINAND MORANT MAKES THE BEST OF THE WURST

FERDINAND MORANT remembered his father's words.

And that's why, despite growing up working in the family cheese factory in his native Switzerland, Morant believed it was all right to leave the family business to become a butcher and eventually a sausage-maker.

It was 1939 and the Nazis were blitzkrieging across Europe. The effects of an impending world war were being felt across the continent.

"My father always told me, "Stay in the food business and you'll always eat,' " Morant recalls. "We always ate in a pinch."

But the days in the cheese factory were long and hard, and 16-year-old Ferdinand Morant wished for something different from waking before dawn in the small Swiss town of Amriswil and tending to the cows, seven days a week.

A butcher lived next to the Morants. He worked six days a week. Young Morant took notice.

"I saw that he was off on Sundays, so then I wanted to be a butcher," he says, half in jest.

At 17, Morant left the family business to serve a three-year butcher's apprenticeship in Olton, Switzerland, where he was trained in every aspect of preparing meat. He followed his father's advice and is still in the food business.

ALMOST 50 YEARS after abandoning a milk pail for a cleaver, Morant has had Sundays off for some time. For the past eight years, Morant and Betty, his wife of 37 years, have owned Morant's Old-Fashioned Sausage Kitchen on Franklin Boulevard, which they operate in a no-nonsense, Old World style. In the 3,750-square-foot building, which he designed, Morant, a proud, stocky man with a barrel torso who looks a decade younger than his 67 years, remains true to the traditions he learned as a young man.

"No matter what it is, our motto is quality," Morant says, his words Germanically accented. "We don't use any by-products or stretchers. It's all pure meat.

"An old teacher of mine told me a long time ago, "If you keep quality up, you'll never go broke because people like to eat something good.' I always think about that."

Morant makes everything from scratch and supervises all aspects of the operation. He takes pride in saying that every meat and sausage is fresh and made entirely from natural ingredients with the painstaking care of someone schooled in a centuries-old tradition.

Morant's building and manufacturing operation is clean and Spartan, and, above all, extremely efficient. The concrete floors are cool and wet, the white fiberglass walls crisp and unsoiled.

When one walks through the store's front door and into the deli area, the senses are assailed with the spicy odor of hickory and elder, the woods Morant uses to smoke his meats. The deli cases are filled with various sausages and meats, and the shelves are loaded with imported grocery items. The mouth waters, the stomach growls . . .

The sausage-making process begins with the grinding of the carefully selected beef, pork and veal. From the grinder it goes into the emulsifier, chopped smooth by three blades whirring at 3,600 rpms. At this point, Morant adds his special blend of spices to the "sausage dough," which then goes into a hydraulic stuffer, where it will be filled into casings (sheep, hog or beef) and then be hung on racks and sprayed with water while the meat becomes solid. Then, depending on what type of sausage is being made, it will go into either the 200-pound stainless-steel vat to be cooked or into the 800-pound smoker. It is then cooled and ready to enjoy.

OF ALL THE steps in the process, the stage where the spices are added is the most important, the most individual, the stage that makes Morant's sausages uniquely his.

Holding a tattered, green plastic notebook, its pages brittle, stained and smeared from running ink, Morant discusses sausage-making. The notebook, every line neatly filled with notes of measurements of various spices, contains recipes Morant has put together in his nearly half-century in the sausage business.

"Everything we make is from my own recipe," Morant says. "Everything is my own spices. All of the mixes are my own. We've got about 25 different spices that we use, and everything has at least 10 spices.

"If a salesman comes and says he has a great pate mix that everyone else is using, I tell him I don't want to be like everyone else. That's why I mix my own."

Morant's daily menu includes more than 25 varieties of sausage, wieners, knockwurst and bratwurst. Smoked meats include ribs, beef tongue, turkey and ham hocks. And then there's the dark, rich-hued bacon - by the slab or by the slice, thick, smoky-sweet and tender. It's not the kind of bacon you just throw into the pan and brown for a few minutes. No, you cook these slices ("planks" may be a more accurate description) slowly.

Morant's list of creations also includes items the straight-laced burghers back home may cringe at: boerwurst, a spicy South African sausage; andouille, a Cajun hot link; and Basque chorizo.

During the hunting season, sportsmen bring their game to Morant, who will turn a deer into venison sausage, salami or smoked meat; he also smokes pheasants, ducks and whatever else hunters bring him.

The most exotic creation Morant has come up with has to be a bear sausage, he says.

"That was so good, it was unbelievable," Morant boasts. "I bet people that if they could guess what it was I'd give them 10 pounds of it. Nobody knew."

Morant follows tradition with everything he makes, but he isn't afraid to toy with tradition sometimes. Take the boerwurst, for example. A customer brought him the recipe a few years back and asked if he could make the sausage. Morant took a look at the ingredients and played with a few variations before settling on a batch he would add to his list.

"I do make the crazy things, but everything has to have a certain percentage of tradition."

Crazy, sure, but good. Morant's creations have won numerous awards over the years from the Culinary Arts Show and from the California Association of Meat Processors.

But the awards, Morant says, don't mean that much.

"It's not the material thing. What I like most is having the satisfaction that people enjoy what I make," he says, sorting through a stack of thank-you notes on his desk and pointing to others hanging on his office wall.
Morant came to the United States in 1951 after a customer at the butcher shop he was working at in Switzerland told him she knew of a a possible opening in a California meat company. Morant corresponded with the owner and eventually came to Alturas to work. A year later he returned to Switzerland, married Betty and then came back to California, where he took a job in Sacramento.

Morant opened his first sausage-making operation with a partner in 1965. After several years the partnership failed, so Ferdinand and Betty opened their own shop on Franklin Boulevard in 1981. Today, 90 percent of Morant's business is over-the-counter retail sales, but he does supply sausages to Biba, Paragary's and the Lucky Cafe.

Soon, it will be time to retire, time to pass on his knowledge of Old World traditions to someone else. And that's the sad part for Ferdinand Morant. When he opened his shop, he was going to pass down his business and his wisdom to his son, Edwin. But upon returning from a trip to Italy and Yugoslavia in 1986, Edwin came down with Lou Gehrig's disease.

"He worked with me for about three more years after that, but then it became hard for him and he stopped," Morant says.

Morant is passing on his knowledge to Dirk Muller, a 29-year-old who spent five years serving an apprenticeship and earning his meister's credential in Frankfurt. It's not the same as teaching his son, Morant admits, but the tradition will be preserved.

"I'd like to see that Dirk carries on what I started," Morant says. "It feels good that this thing I started and people like is going to keep going."