Dutch Letters!

I'm following up on a subject from a few months ago--remember the Dutch Bakery in Tipton? The Mennonite-run grocery and bulk foods store? Under the Giant 8-Ball? (How could you forget!)

Well, soon after that post, I got a comment from Michael, who said, "Anyone who reads this, you have, have, have to get a dutch letter. Flaky hand-crafted pastry with a delicious creamy almond filling, baked into, you guessed it, the shape of letters."

I had to admit, with my focus on bulk foods, I hadn't spent a lot of time exploring the Dutch Bakery's bakery. (Now that I write that, I know how silly that sounds.)

Then, another reader, who remains anonymous, reinforced Michael's comments: "Have to agree about the dutch letters. When I lived in Jeff City, I would stop there at least once a month on the way to KC and have been dreaming of them since. I went to the lake with the family this week and was so happy that road work on 52 made us swing through Tipton today. For under $20, I got 5 dutch letters, huge bags of roasted salted soy beans, cheese straws, pasta, and gummy butterflies. The dutch letters are just as good as I remember."

So: "Put it on the List."

(I have a nice big List, by the way.)

So: Recently Sue and I drove to Tipton for breakfast. They offer free coffee at the Dutch Bakery, but--well, we'd brewed up some good-tasting high-class coffee at home and brought it with us in our to-go mug. In part, because we didn't want to wait until we got to Tipton in order to have coffee. (You know how it is.)

We had other stuff to buy there, too. I needed some more oat bran, for instance.

I don't know if this is how they always do it, but they had them on big trays, stacked two or three layers thick, and it was the same five letters: L, o, v, e, and s. (You can buy them as individual letters, but you get a price break if you buy all five).




I'm not sure what the S is for, apart from conjugation or the plural. Maybe the S shape is the most fun to eat, with its sinuous form?

Then again, if the two ends of pastry on the O didn't match up perfectly, you might be able to turn it just right to make it look like a lowercase a, to spell SLave.

But that would be silly. (Hmm: buy ten letters, to spell out Love SLaves--? Hah!)

We took our white paper sack of letters and our mug of coffee to the little roadside park just east of the Dutch Bakery and, sitting at a lichen-dusted picnic table between an oak tree and a little shrine to St. Francis, ate a couple of Dutch letters.

Pretty tasty!




But maybe my expectations were too high; those were some pretty enthusiastic endorsements I'd gotten. But they seemed kind of heavy to me. Terrific, in the sense that they were substantial and satisfied the hungry belly--but although the almond filling was generous, light, and tasty, the pastry enfolding it seemed chewier and harder than I was expecting.

Did they overwork the dough, or over- or undercook it? It seems like it should have been flakier, more like a pie crust. Though perhaps they can't be too flaky, lest they lose structural integrity . . . I don't know.

I appreciate the fact that they were not iced or sugarcoated--they were sweet, but not overly so.

Oh, I'll get them again for sure--maybe these specimens were day-old Dutch letters or something. --But at least I'm not Dutch-letter illiterate anymore.

The 5 and 50 Drive-In, Tipton, Missouri

All roads lead to the 5 and 50—most notably, Highways 5 and 50. And if you look at these two roads, you might indeed realize that the 5 and 50 could very easily be on your itinerary, if you don’t watch it.




Tipton's 5 and 50 Drive-In, named for its position at the intersection of the two highways, is one of those wonderful, unique little businesses you can find in small towns all over the place, but rarely on the interstates, dominated by boring chain restaurants and their mind-numbing sameness.

I said it’s unique, because it is, but it’s also like plenty of other little drive-ins that offer soft-serve ice cream creations, chili dogs, fried snacks, and sodas, sold from behind a sliding window in a little hut with a big sign on top. There are picnic tables, in case you don’t want to eat in your car.




And each of these places is different, and each is beloved by the surrounding community, as well as by tourist regulars, truckers, bikers, who have learned to stop there as they travel from point A to B.

Similar places: Zesto, the Pied Piper, Vargo’s (Norwalk, Ohio), and the sadly defunct Polar Freeze (Mesquite, Nevada).

The last time we were at the 5 and 50, the guy behind the window said that the business had been there for at least fifty years. (I suspect that some of my readers can tell me precisely how far back the 5 and 50 really goes.)

Here is one of the menu boards.




This is the real thing, folks. If you drive up to this restaurant in anything younger than a 1959 Ford Galaxie 500, you will feel like a visitor from the future, a spaceman.




Now I’m going to support my sweeping generalization at the top of this post: All roads lead to the 5 and 50!

Missouri Route 5 traverses the entire state, north to south. It’s the only Missouri state highway to extend all the way across the state, as a matter of fact. Highway 5 extends into three states. Across the border in Iowa, it turns into Iowa Highway 5 and leads clear to Des Moines!

In Missouri, it connects such important places as Marceline (boyhood home of Walt Disney), historic Boonville, the Lake of the Ozarks (Missouri’s own vacationland), Camdenton (home of Bridal Cave), Lebanon (the Aluminum Fishing Boat Capital of the World), and Mansfield (where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived for about sixty years; she wrote “some books” there).




South of Missouri, the highway enters Arkansas, where it becomes Arkansas Highway 5 and leads to the charming Ozark city of Mountain Home (Bluegrass Central—you really have to go there), then down to Calico Rock (perched prettily on the White River), through part of the Ozark National Forest, through Mountain View (which is different from Mountain Home) and Heber Springs, Rosebud, and Romance, clear to the north fringes of the Little Rock metro area.

Des Moines to Little Rock: So it should go without saying that Iowa/Missouri/Arkansas 5 connects with scads of U.S. Highways, as well as some major Interstates (40, 44, 70, and 35).

Okay, then the other line of the “plus sign” centered in Tipton, U.S. 50, stretches more than three thousand miles from Ocean City, Maryland, to Sacramento, California; before they replaced its westernmost stretch with new concrete spaghetti, it used to stretch clear to San Francisco. It goes through twelve states—clear across the continent.




And when you consider that Missouri is, ohhh, roughly centered in the lower 48, you can see that, given the extent of the two highways aiming right at Tipton, it wouldn’t take too many turns to get to a road that will intersect Route 5 or Highway 50, and from there, you got it: It’s a straight shot to the 5 and 50.




The 5 and 50 is closer than you think.

Dutch Bakery and Bulk Foods, Tipton, Missouri

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this scene, here in the Midwest, where large, centralized (and often overpriced) health-food bulk grocery stores are hard to find, we rely on Mennonite- or Amish-run stores out in the country for bulk ingredients.

Apart from highway signs, these stores don’t do a lot of advertising; most customers just “know” they’re there, by word of mouth.

The Dutch Bakery is on Highway 50 on the west side of Tipton, Missouri. It’s run by a family of Old Order Mennonites, and the store’s been there twenty-three years. (The owner told me that they started selling baked goods and produce at the Sedalia and Jeff City farmers’ markets five years before the store opened, so they’ve actually been in business since about 1982.)




Here’s a picture taken in late 2009, with the leaves gone. Notice anything unusual? How about that! Yes, it’s true—the World’s Largest 8-Ball looms like an alien eyeball over this sincere little grocery store!

See, there’s history: This water tower was painted to look like a huge 8-ball because Fischer Manufacturing, a billiard company, used to be right there by the water tower. When Spalding bought them out in 1968, Fischer was the country’s largest builder of pool tables. Tipton’s quite proud of its landmark!




Anyway, it’s quirky juxtapositions like this—the Mennonite grocery sitting there, keeping a straight face, beneath this giant goofy 8-Ball—that make small towns such a gas.

And if you’re driving along Highway 50, you have no excuse for “missing” the Dutch Bakery—just look for the Giant 8-Ball!

By the way, if you’re reading this and are not sure you’ll feel comfortable venturing into the “different culture” of a Mennonite-run grocery store, get over yourself! Yes, Mennonites are rather soft-spoken; the women wear those little caps; and you’ll probably overhear some musical and unintelligible Pennsylvania- or Swiss-German dialect—but make no mistake: You are welcome here, and they, like all store owners, are glad to sell you their stuff!

At Dutch Market, in addition to a huge variety of bulk foods, pasta, snacks, dried fruits, and baking supplies, they also sell hanging baskets, vegetable starts, and bedding plants in season; wooden lawn furniture; homemade bakery goods; home-canning supplies; meats and cheeses; and fresh local produce.

Part grocery, part produce-stand, and part bakery, this is where I got the cantaloupe the other day that became Ginger Melon Sorbet. I also got some pumpkin-walnut bread and a Swedish tea ring (day-old, discounted—give me a break) and some nice ripe yellow and red tomatoes. (Yes, the good kind!) There were also new potatoes, squash, cucumbers, and plenty more.




And bulk spices! —I had run out of bay leaves. At Dutch Bakery, I bought their smallest plastic sack of bulk bay leaves (I think it’s fresher when they bag it from bulk)—0.13 lb. (which is at least ten times as much as you get in a bottle of Durkee) for 85 cents. The only problem with this? Now I’ve got lots more bay than I know what to do with. What a hardship, huh?

Unlike a lavish, orthorexic-approved Whole Foods supermarket (or “Whole Paycheck,” as some of my friends call it), Dutch Bakery sells some bulk items that can’t be called “health foods.” Many of the dried fruits are stabilized with sulpher dioxide, and they can be tinted with, say, FD&C Yellow #6. (They are plainly marked, so it’s not like they’re hiding it from you.)

And you can buy, in bulk, all kinds of powdered and dehydrated soup and dip mixes—which, compared to homemade soups and sauces from scratch, are at a minimum just sad, and at worst, an abomination. (Unless you're camping or something.) I saw you can also get bags of that fluorescent-neon-orange powder that you add to cooked macaroni to make a bulk-foods equivalent to “Kraft Mac & Cheese.” Again, it’s not exactly “health food.” But then—if you’re wanting to feed your army on the cheap, this is the place for you.

I love it that I can get my healthy bulk grains there. Oat bran muffins, here we come!




The summary: It’s a family-run, small, local business. They’ve got great prices on a bunch of stuff that you want to buy. The produce is top-notch. The drive there is pleasant. And you’ll smile.

Plus, while you’re there, you can take pictures of the World’s Largest 8-Ball!




More Information That You Didn’t Ask for but Ought to Know

There’s a lot more to enjoy in Tipton, Missouri, such as the Vanilla Grill (believed by some to have the best chocolate ice cream ever), and Ghetto Superstar. Tipton is also the hometown of Gene Clark (a founding member of the Byrds), and he’s buried there. So if you’re a fan, you have to make a pilgrimage to the St. Andrew Catholic Cemetery, now, too!





ADDENDUM, October 8, 2010
In light of the enthusiastic endorsements below, I went and got some of the Dutch Bakery's "Dutch letters." Here's my post on them.