Dead mouse keeps kringlar a Christmas treat

My sisters could have warned me.

This weekend, I fired up our 20-year-old Whirlpool range to bake a quadruple batch of Norwegian kringlar, our family’s favorite buttery, almond pastry. It’s such a sacred recipe, in fact, that we usually reserve it only for Christmas morning.

But this weekend, I was asked to bring food for a reception following our church’s late service. The friend organizing this effort planned to bake Swedish egg kake, similar to a puffed Dutch baby pancake. Why not add the kringlar, I thought, which is a Danish recipe, and part of my family’s cultural heritage? Makes perfect sense for a gathering of Lutherans on Spokane’s South Hill on a sunny August morning.

When my daughters heard of this plan, they begged for extra kringlar, enough, in fact, to send along to camp with my daughter on the counseling staff.

So I bought two pounds of butter, a brand new bottle of almond extract and a five-pound sack of flour, and set to work. The cat licked her whiskers in the dining room.

The recipe is not terribly difficult. It involves a butter crust, a puffy almond layer and creamy icing. It’s a taste of Scandinavian heaven we can’t start Christmas morning without.

I mixed up the first two layers, started the oven and began constructing the first four strips of pastry on cookie sheets. Then I caught a whiff of something suspicious.

At first we thought it might have been soup spilled under the burners. So my daughter and I began scrubbing burner liners and the surface underneath them. The more we scrubbed and disinfected, the faster the odor rose.

We opened windows and doors. It grew worse. Foul diapers. Putrid fish guts. Something horrid.

My husband wandered in. This odor, he pointed out, couldn’t be caused by spilled chowder.

So we opened the bottom drawer under the oven. As we peered into the dim light, my husband recognized them first: tiny black rice kernel droppings. A mouse, he said.

The stench continued to steam into the kitchen as our kringlar baked. So I turned off the oven. Dumped four batches of kringlar (a full pound of butter and all) into the trash. Followed by the open ingredients left on the counter — the flour, the rest of the butter, maybe even the eggs. I don’t quite remember. I was caught up in a mouse-induced frenzy, nearly overcome by Clorox fumes. At one point I think I was using five different cleaning products — a gel, a spray and a powdered cleanser all containing bleach, a disinfectant detergent, and a spritz of 409 just for good measure. We were lucky paramedics didn’t need to be called.

We prevailed on my husband to pull the range away from the wall. We vacuumed, scrubbed and disinfected every possible surface we could reach. But still the smell lingered.

I called my friend from church later in the evening to confess: There would be no kringlar at the church reception. There was this little problem about a mouse. No wonder the cat had been yowling in the night.

As I told the tale, she began to chuckle. She told me of a miserable experience when leftover lutefisk went bad in her freezer. So bad, in fact, that the whole refrigerator had to be pitched out. Soon I was practically weeping with laughter.

Our encounter with the mouse was awful. It may be expensive. And, predictably, it downright delighted everyone at the church reception who heard the tale the next morning. (Luckily, they so loved the Swedish dish, similarly based on eggs, powdered sugar and butter, that they didn’t miss the kringlar a bit.)

That’s the thing about so many household disasters. As long as no one dies, these stories quickly slide from the horrific to the hysterical. They’re somehow binding. An acquaintance who might have admired my kringlar but quickly turned away now lingers a bit longer to hear more of this malodorous tale. In the days since, I’ve heard more mouse-in-appliance stories than I’d ever dreamed existed.

Appliance repairmen tell me these tales aren’t unusual. Mice can nest in the insulation of a range, then die quickly when an oven is turned on. Often the only remedy is to buy a new range.

Fortunately, our repairman reported that the mouse, that slovenly housekeeper, treated the oven drawer and the floor under my range as her personal summer vacation home, but didn’t manage to die right inside the appliance. The cat probably swallowed it whole.

Tempting though it might be to gut the entire kitchen, I may get off with only the price of a service call, a gallon or two of cleaning products, some mousetraps, and a dent in the nostalgia that surrounds our cherished family recipe.

We were left richer, actually, with a tale to share for years.

I e-mailed my sisters, a pair of firm kringlar traditionalists, with this news.

“That’s what you get,” the first one chided, “for making kringlar in the summer.”

The second simply concurred: “August makes for bad kringlar karma.”