In the memory of my 7-year-old self, there was so much that made Racine, Wisconsin, special. As a brand-new arrival from Mumbai, I thought Racine possessed many of the traditional trappings of Americana I had extrapolated from secondhand 1950s Archie comics: four complete seasons requiring four different wardrobes; Kewpee burgers the size of your head served with unapologetically caloric malted milkshakes; a singular Main Street; local festivals with hulking cream puffs; and freshwater fishing tournaments with participants lamenting the ones that got away. At the same time, Racine had so much that made it unlike any other city in the country: Frank Lloyd Wright architecture; preserved remnants of the 1964 World’s Fair; the incomparable Lake Michigan shoreline; and the epicenter of the greatest prom in the world.
But, for those not in the know, what has put Racine on the map is the city’s true pride and joy: a fruit-and-nut stuffed pastry that is perhaps the last visible bastion of a once-booming Danish enclave. Welcome to Kringleville.
Racine’s version of the originally Scandinavian kringle is, at its best, numbingly sweet and astonishingly butter-forward. It takes three days to roll, fold, and rest the 36 layers of butter, margarine, and dough that make up its surprisingly low profile (it measures less than an inch between plate and icing). That super soft but dense puff pastry is then swaddled around your choice of sweet filling — classic flavors like almond and apple, or perhaps a more daring pumpkin caramel, a chocolatey-caramel pecan-stuffed turtle, or cherry cheese — and then finally spun into a large, flat ring, blanketed with a powdered sugar glaze.
Kringle defined, and still defines, Racine. The city once boasted the largest Danish population in North America. At the turn of the 20th century, the new Danish arrivals brought their baking traditions, and kringle quickly took over the town — a full-blown pastry phenomenon. Women competed to be crowned the Kringle Queen of Racine. The pastry inspired a polka, as well as an annual festival. And despite chiefly catering to southeastern Wisconsin, its reputation loomed so large and its champions were so fervent that kringle beat out the beloved cream puff to become the official state pastry in 2013. Today, some of the original family-run bakeries from the 1930s and ’40s — like Lehmann’s, Bendtsen’s, and O&H — still proudly steward the city’s kringle-making legacy.