...in time -- well actually, the answer is right here a few paragraphs ahead, but you aren't the type of person who skips to the last page of a mystery novel and spoils the ending, are you? You wouldn't videotape the big game and then sneak a peek at the last minute to see who won before watching the game from the start, would you? Well, okay then.

Your guesses were pretty inventive, some even bizarre. Bravo! We need to categorically rule out some of your suggestions. Some of you surveyed the damage and concluded that somebody must have run around the kitchen splattering brown gook everywhere. Let me assure you that these stains were not sprinkled by anyone either deliberately or, as one reader suggested, by Jackson Pollack freaking out. First of all, Jackson Pollack died in 1956, but anyway, there were no human beings (or pets) in the whole house at the time this mess was created. As you may surmise, this was part of the reason why it happened in the first place. Although, in retrospect, it probably also spared us from possibly serious bodily injury.

Many of you started by attempting to identify the source of the mess. Most of you correctly deduced that the splatters on the wall started out as the contents of a pot on the stove. But which pot? Was it the white Corningware pot? Was it the small pink pot? The frying pan? What about that little thingy on the front burner trying to look all sweet and innocent?

Some of you surveyed the lineup of suspects and found them all too unsuspicious and guessed that there must have been some other pot, like a mean and vicious pressure cooker, hiding behind the bushes in the grassy knoll across the street. Well, my friends, the guilty party (I mean "potty" -- I'm from Boston where we pronounce the word that way anyway) is still at the scene.

And the perpetrator is...

...the Pink Pot!

Many of you ventured guesses as to the composition of the splatters. Spaghetti? Tomato sauce? Coffee? Beans? Preserves? Eggs? Nice tries, but all wrong. Nevertheless, I give you guys credit, I mean here, look at it. Does that look identifiable to you?

The most inventive and surprisingly close guess comes from "henris":

Okay, enough teasing. The time has come to reveal the mystery muck splattered all over the room. The brown sticky gunk is in fact...Sweetened Condensed Milk.

Not what you expected, is it? Kind of raises more questions than it answers doesn't it? Ah, hear the story and all will become clear.

The year is approximately 1990. I am an undergraduate, living in an off-campus house with two roommates. I will use pseudonyms to protect their identities. One roommate was born in Los Angeles (and now lives there), we'll call him Steven Speilberg. The other roommate was from Moscow, we'll call him Mikhail Gorbachev.

It's important to note that Mikhail comes from Moscow because in Russia they don't eat all the same foods in the same way we do in America. For example, Mikhail would sometimes eat his breakfast cereal or oatmeal with big scoops of fruit preserves from a jar with Cyrillic letters all over the label. Scoops of sticky sweet stuff on cereal seems to be a breakfast theme in Russia, because Steven and I saw Mikhail spoon out other varieties of sweet goop in a similar manner.

Once Mikhail was having Oat Squares for breakfast with scoops of a sticky brown caramel-like substance that he was spooning from an unlabeled can.

"What is that?" Steven asked.

"Oh, it's good!" said Mikhail in response. "It's sweetened condensed milk."

"Are you sure it's still good?" I asked. "I mean, isn't it supposed to be white?"

"Yes," Mikhail explained, "but I cooked it. I take the can and put it in a pot of boiling water. After a few hours it turns brown and becomes delicious. We do this in Russia."

Okay, who am I to argue with a world super power? If Mikhail Gorbachev wants to cook his sweetened condensed milk until it turns brown, why should I argue?

One morning, I saw the pink pot on the stove sitting covered over a low flame and bubbling softly. I took a peek inside and saw an unlabeled can simmering in a boiling water bath. As I departed for class, I checked with Mikhail, "Caramelized sweetened condensed milk again, right?" Mikhail knodded in the affirmative.

By now you've got it all figured out. When I returned several hours later, nobody was home and the kitchen looked like this. Clearly the water had boiled away in Mikhail's absence and the pressure built up inside the can of sweetened condensed milk until it finally exploded in a burst of scalding caramelized glory.

The blast was clearly quite strong. For starters, the pot cover was blown off and the pink pot was nearly thrown off the burner (as you can see in the picture). Sticky sugary brown gook was splattered everywhere in the kitchen, including the ceiling. When Steven and Mikhail got home, we spent some time just gawking at the aftermath. I snapped these pictures to capture the moment.

Although we were not there to witness the explosion, we had pretty much figured out what had happened. Yet, there remained still one more mystery, the mystery that held the secret of the true power of the blast. About an hour after discovery, one of us said, "Um... where's the can?"

Yes, the can (or what was left of it) was missing. We looked all around the kitchen and couldn't find it. Could it have been obliterated in the explosion? Not likely. Flown out the window? No, the windows were closed. Well, then where the heck was the can?

Two weeks later, the can was found and solved the mystery in astonishing fashion. Two weeks after the mess, I lifted up a white shirt that was sitting on top of my dresser to send it out for cleaning. It turned out that it needed cleaning a lot more desperately than I had originally thought as it had blotches of caramel on it. When I lifted the shirt up, the can came rolling out and thunked onto the floor. The can had split open down the side along the seam. The edges of the seam had been blown apart as if someone had grabbed the edges of the seam and pulled them in opposite directions until the gap was about an inch and a half wide.

The truly astonishing part is that the can was on top of my dresser (okay, and that I take two weeks to launder a shirt, but hey, this was college). I don't have the best photographs to depict this, but this is the best reconstruction I can make of the presumed path of the detonating can. Follow the yellow or red line.

 
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