Thrift Store Scouts and Chocolate Coconut Cake

My 10 year old daughter a.k.a side-kick and I have a fun new hobby; we’ve become Thrift Store Scouts. We haven’t started a troop or anything like that, it’s just the two of us. We did try to recruit video game loving son one of the first times we went. He was not a fan. We live in an area with a lot of these stores and they exist both individually and in clusters. Son spent that one time asleep in the car during our first store stops and when we tried to wake him to go into the last one (the favorite store and one daughter and I refer to as “our store”) we managed to get him up to experience the ‘magic’. He walked through the door with us, saw there wasn’t much produced after the year 1992 that contained any type of computer chips and proceeded to make his place in the worn velvet, salmon colored chair closest to the door. Head slumped over cell phone, he spent the rest of that visit in the digital world texting his way towards 2010 and left us behind as we scoured the thrifty universe that happily takes us back in time.

I can’t remember exactly what drew daughter and I into these stores for the first time little more than a month ago. I think initially it was that we knew there were many around here and they have a lot of things that are new or almost new priced at next to nothing. What brought us back a second time were the books! Beautiful books both old and some new and untouched looking for as little as twenty-five cents each. What I noticed immediately were the like new cookbooks that first-hand might cost as much as $30 were there for the taking for at the most $2.00. Daughter is a ravenous reader, plowing through novels in a day. While she enjoys our visits to the library, it just never compares to the treasure of holding onto that book that just took you on a terrific journey. So that’s what brought us back a second time. But…what grabbed me, hooked me in and made me obsessed began with a typewriter.

Daughter is in love with words, language and ideas like her mama. She can spend days on end caught up in pages and not feel that she’s missed a thing. She’s a deep and reflective thinker and caught a bug several months back for typewriters. I’d notice time and time again after she’d been on my laptop, I’d come back to it and find it open to eBay searches for manual typewriters. To her they were machines of magic from a far away land where each finger had the power to produce a letter with a magical click. They were pretty pricey to buy online as a token of curiousity and not an item of need. I joined in her search online without her knowing it and began looking to see if I might find one without outrageous shipping and at a reasonable price. My searches were pretty fruitless. They were all about $50 and up and shipping for one of those dinosaurs was never cheap. So about two visits into our Thrift Store Scouting, a lightbulb went off. The day before daughter had seen an electric typewriter in one of the thrift stores but it was (eww) electric and what really fascinated her were the manual ones. So that day I called the store we had been in to see if they might have one that they hadn’t put out yet. No. Some of the stores are near my son’s school so I decided to check them out before I picked the kids up that day.

One of our favorite thrift store shopping centers has a large anchor store facing a busy street with two small shops to the left of it and in a small strip shopping center behind it there are three more (Thrift Store Scout heaven). It was about two weeks before Chanukah and I had started my shopping for the kids just the day before. I went into the large store and looked around, asked the cashier and no, they didn’t have typewriters of any kind. Not finding any typewriters I surfed the bookshelves and found “The Everything Book About Writing Your First Novel” handbook, waiting for me and calling my daughter’s name, in pristine condition with the price sticker of a whopping $1.99. Chanukah present number three.

Hugging the book closely I went on to stores one and two in the small strip shopping center moving quickly and already having adrenaline pumping from my first find. Left them quickly to get to store number three. I was cutting it close, time was dwindling before I had to make my way to “parent pick-up”.

I hadn’t ever been to store number three before. While the anchor store isn’t by any means pretty or does it have an especially inviting atmosphere, the look of it still says store. Racks and shelves are neatly organized by color, The cashiers have that demeanor that says hi, you just walked into our store. Store Number Three isn’t like that.

Store Number Three is the last one in the row before the dumpsters. It’s doors were wide open and welcoming. I approached the threshold and was immediately met with the essence of old basement and a loud, energetic yet somewhat garbled, “Hi, how ya doing today?!” I saw the back of a woman behind a cluttered glass case turning towards a cash register. There were two other customers in the store both looked a bit forlorn in their own right. To the right was an old bookcase, reminiscent of some my grandparents had, with a bunch of books and no real definition behind their order. One with the cover facing out “Dog Save the Queen”, caught my eye with its quirkiness. Northwest of me was someone’s discarded dining room table which was covered with assorted glass and tableware. Behind that were several racks of clothing. Northeast of that, shelves and boxes filled with books and over to the west, shelves lined with kitchenware and garage stuff. Mostly old, sad looking items. No real treasures calling out to me. I made my way around the small, cluttered, crowded, stuffy store. Searching. I found a musty Betty Crocker Casseroles cookbook and some Pillsbury recipe magazines that while they smelled a bit like a basement after a flood, thrilled me to pieces to have found.

Next, I went to the glass case with the cash register and met the manager. central casting could not have done a better job for this role. A huge crooked smile with windows of missing teeth greeted me with a hearty “So, what didjya find?!”.  Late fourties, early fiftiesish disheveled yet thoughtful looking brunette, with stringy shoulder length hair that perfectly matched her smile and banter. I put the books in front of her and asked a bit timidly  if she ever got manual typewriters. “You mean like this?” She turned around and from a pile under a strangely placed old desk pulled out a worn, marked up gold typewriter case. She put it on the counter and when she opened the lock, bright lights showered in through the door, angels sang and harp music played. OK, none of that actually happened but my heart began racing as I looked inside and saw the charcoal gray dinosaur introduce itself to me with it’s name plate “Royal”, circa 1940s. It was love at first sight with Royal. She then excitedly (with some bits of spittle thrown in for good measure) went on to tell me the story of how she had one just like it that she had sold days before to a ninety year old man who came looking for one with his nurses aide. He only wanted a manual typewriter because he wanted to write things the way that he used to. She had another one just like Royal and he bought it and just a few days later this one came in and it was the same exact kind.His didn’t have much ink left on the ribbon. She put paper into Royal to see how she’d type and while it was light, there was enough ink to see that everything worked just fine. I asked her how much for it (nothing in this store ever has a price which makes it even better, she makes it up as she goes along). “Ahhh, I don’t know, give me $20 for it!”. I worked hard to contain the shriek of joy that was trying so hard to explode from me and did what my husband calls “the inner freak”. I told her my daughter’s story of typewriter love and how this was going to be the greatest surprise. I loved this lady!  She shared my joy and told the story to the next woman who came in the store. The customer took in the story and had a huge smile with a great appreciation of a child who enjoyed and respected days gone by and simpler times.

I paid for Royal and my books and took off to my car with minutes to spare for parent pickup. I put Royal on the passenger side of the floor next to me and covered her up with some bags and sweatshirts that were in the car and then called my husband to share the joy of my discovery and get my outer freak on.

Royal hid in my closet until the last night of Chanukah behind stacks of sweaters. Over the next few weeks daughter and I visited our thrift stores time and time again but I never set foot into THE store for fear of the shopkeeper spilling the beans from her own excitement of the find. A few times daughter saw some electric typewriters and while that wasn’t what she wanted, she began asking if she could get one because she had given up on finding a manual one. Each time I shrugged it off with responses like, “Why do you want a typewriter, what are you going to do with that?” and the kind.

The last night of Chanukah came and after we lit the candles and said the blessings, it was present time. In the days before the kids had gotten smaller gifts; books, candy, etc. This night was the grand finale and with that came the biggie gifts. I had her close her eyes and with that put out the book about writing a novel. She opened her eyes and joy jumped out of her. While she chatted about the book, I interrupted her mid sentence and had her close her eyes again. I put the faded gold case with a preschoolers name “Tamara” scrawled on a corner in front of her. She opened her eyes and did an Outer Freak like no other. This hugging, shrieking and “You are theeee best parents in the world, this is my greatest treasure!!!!!!” went on for a while. Once she took it all in she ran to get a piece of paper and I showed her how to work it.

She went on to type a recap of what had taken place and a thank you ode to us for her new found friend.

So, it all began with a typewriter. Since then, we’ve discovered countless other treasures in these stores which I’ll be sharing with you but I wanted to introduce to what started the love and our Thrift Ship Thrills.

About a week ago we were in Our Store and on my way out of the book section this caught my eye

I instantly got that “I found a treasure feeling” that sets my heart aflutter. It was marked $4.00 but all books and the like were on sale for 50% off! I showed it to my daughter who said “Oh Mommy, you have to get that. It is SO you!” . And that it was, so me. I remember recipe card collections as a kid that people would subscribe to and collect over time and thinking about the excitement one would feel when completing a collection like this.

When we got home I checked out my file and Googled it to learn more about it. McCall’s 1973 Great American Recipe Card Collection. As I Googled some more I came across this blog focused on vintage recipes and had a post on a recipe from this set. I read the post and scrolled down to find this comment:

I am desperately looking for Recipe Card 9M (a chocolate coconut cake) from the County Fairs Recipes in the 1973 cCalls Great American Recipe Card Collection. I would greatly appreciate the recipe!

Kelly

kkcurry@aol.com

August 11, 2008 3:39 PM

My wheels began to spin with excitement. I know it had been a while since Kelly posted her inquiry but I immediately searched my file and Bingo! I have card 9M!!!

So I wrote this:

Hi Kelly,

I know it’s been a long time since you posted this comment on this blog:

http://rochellesvintagerecipes.blogspot.com/2008/01/braised-beef-with-cabbage-mccalls.html

I was on Google today looking for more information on the 1973 McCall’s Great American Recipe Card Collection because I bought a set of them at a thrift store. I saw your post and thought I’d get in touch with you because if you are still looking for this recipe, I have it on card 9M. Just let me know and I’ll send it to you.

(See your original message below).

This was a few days ago. I don’t know if Kelly cares about this cake anymore or if I went right into her spam file but I sooooo have my fingers crossed that she got my email and I have thrilled her to no end and I will hear from her.

The other day in deciding what baking delight I should make next I thought of Kelly and her lost cake and decided if she was searching for this recipe, it must be a good one. So I made it. Oh yum! Oh my! My kids and I love it. It’s a little to sweet and rich for my husband but he really enjoyed a small piece of it.Of course my son missed the first tasting but tried it the next day.

While there is no caramel in it, as I ate it I had sense memories of my all time favorite Girl Scout cookies, Samoas. My husband had childhood flashbacks to German Chocolate Cake. My daughter just said, “Mommy, this is SO good!” But to me what tasted best about this cake was the story behind it. One that I hope to share with Kelly one day.