Chocolate Angel Pie

Name: Chocolate Angel Pie
Yield: 1 (9-inch) pie; 8 servings
Ingredients: Unsalted butter, for the pie plate; 1/4 cup granulated sugar; 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar; 2 large egg whites, at room temperature; 1/2 cup pecans or other nuts, coarsely broken or chopped; 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips or finely chopped semisweet chocolate; 3 tablespoons hot water; 1 teaspoon vanilla extract; 1 cup heavy cream, cold

Royce Cafe

400 South Broadway
Edmond, Oklahoma

1934 – 1970

Royce B. Adamson came to the restaurant business by way of the printing press. In the 1920s he’d been the editor and publisher of The Edmond Enterprise, the weekly newspaper that served Edmond, Oklahoma, a college and farming town of a few thousand people ten miles north of Oklahoma City. What pulled him out of publishing and into the kitchen, by most accounts, was a friendship. Crawford Noe ran the Wide-A-Wake Cafe at 213 South Broadway, a 31-seat lunchroom that had opened in 1927 as the “Night & Day” and fed truckers around the clock — for years it was said to be the only all-night stop on U.S. Route 66 between Tulsa and Amarillo. Adamson and Noe were best of friends who hunted and fished together, and Noe’s enthusiasm for the trade proved contagious. He urged Adamson to open his own cafe.

The moment Adamson chose was, on paper, a terrible one. The Great Depression had settled over Oklahoma, and drought and dust were shaping much of the state. But the region’s oil industry was on the cusp of a boom — the Royce Cafe’s own postcards would later boast of “The Edmond Oil Field, Three Miles West” — and the corner Adamson picked, Fourth and Broadway, sat squarely on the pavement shared through town by U.S. Highway 77 and the early alignment of U.S. Route 66. The traffic moving along Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles, or north and south on U.S. 77, passed his front door.

Adamson announced his plans for a combination cafe and filling station in March 1934 — the original scheme even included tourist courts, which apparently never materialized — and construction on the stone building began that May. The Royce Cafe and Adamson’s Service Station opened for business on July 26, 1934. The name on the sign was Royce’s, but the enterprise was a partnership from the first: He and his wife, Neva, ran the cafe together, with Neva presiding over the kitchen and the pies that would build its reputation, and for the next eight years virtually every expansion and improvement would be announced in the newspapers under a joint billing: “Mr. and Mrs. Royce B. Adamson, Proprietors.”

What rose at Fourth and Broadway was built to last: a low building faced in native red sandstone, with the Royce Cafe inside and Adamson’s Service Station out front, its three Conoco pumps standing at the northwest corner of the lot. Both businesses were open 24 hours a day — a habit the Adamsons may well have borrowed from their friend Noe. Early advertising kept things simple: sandwiches, hamburgers, lunches, ice cream, and cold drinks, with curb service and plenty of parking.

The formula worked from the get-go. By 1936 newspaper ads for the Royce Cafe were headlining a “Big Plate Lunch” for a quarter and touting the establishment as the “Coolest Cafe in Town.” A T-bone steak dinner ran 45 cents; the rest of the menu leaned on sandwiches, homemade chili, soups, pies, and what the Adamsons pointedly advertised as “Real Coffee.” That Thanksgiving, a complete turkey dinner cost 50 cents.

Within two years of opening, the crowds had outgrown the building. In the summer of 1936 the Adamsons had an 18-by-40-foot dining room built onto its south end — constructed and fitted out with fixtures, the Enterprise marveled, in the record time of three weeks. The newspaper credited the cafe’s “wonderful growth in business” for the expansion, reporting that for weeks the original room had been entirely inadequate for the throngs gathering there. The new dining room seated 40, bringing the establishment’s total capacity to 75.

Expansion also gave the Adamsons room to experiment. In 1936 they introduced a novelty called the “Ring Around the Rosey,” for which the Royce Cafe held what it advertised as an exclusive territorial franchise. The steak was cooked inside a covered ring intended to seal in its juices and special seasoning, then served as part of a complete meal with all the hot biscuits a customer wanted. The first biscuits would come from the oven at 5:30 each evening, with fresh batches following throughout the night.

That same year the Adamsons stepped back from the gasoline side of the operation, leasing the station to Herb Keys, who promptly installed a hydraulic lift outdoors in the parking lot to speed servicing. In 1938 Keys built his own station on the northwest corner of the same intersection.

The cafe’s advertising through the late 1930s reads like a seasonal almanac of small-town appetites. In the summer of 1937: ice-cold watermelon at a dime a slice, and fresh peaches and cream. Plate lunches held at 25 cents, complete dinners at 45 cents. The same year the Royce Cafe also announced the arrival of “that good Alpen Brau Beer,” a St. Louis brew made legal again in Oklahoma by the state’s embrace of 3.2 percent beer. And in 1938 the Adamsons announced that a new air-conditioning unit now cooled their cafe.

The Adamsons staffed the place with family and hired good-looking students from Central State Teachers College, a short walk away, to wait tables. The around-the-clock hours and the highway location pulled in bus tours, ball teams, touring musical groups — and, if family lore is to be believed, one notorious outlaw. As the story was later told by the Adamsons’ daughter, John Dillinger stopped in one evening for a cup of coffee. Adamson was warned not to call the authorities at the risk of his life, and — looking out at two guns pointed his way from the windows of a long black car with curtained windows — he was more than willing to comply. The tale, however, is undoubtedly apocryphal, as Dillinger was shot dead outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934 — four days before the Royce Cafe had opened for business.

Sometime around 1940, the Royce Cafe issued a postcard for which it is now, regrettably, best remembered. One side carried a portrait of Royce B. Adamson, the slogan “From Dawn to Dawn We’re Never Gone,” and a civic booster’s inventory of Edmond’s charms: the college, the churches, the parks, the paving, the Santa Fe railroad and hourly interurban service, the oil field three miles west. Folded into that list, as matter-of-factly as the flour mills and the ice plant, was the line: “A Good Place to Live … 6,000 Live Citizens — No Negroes.”

The card was not an aberration. Edmond was a sundown town — a community that deliberately barred Black residents — and had promoted itself as such since at least 1920, when the student newspaper at the college listed the absence of a “negro element” among the features of an ideal school town. Racial covenants barred property sales to anyone who was not white or Native American in every Edmond neighborhood platted between 1911 and 1949, save one. A 1942 promotional letter located Edmond “In the Center of the White Spot of the Universe,” and a newcomer’s guide published four years later, circulated with letters from local businesses and the mayor, put the town’s population at an estimated 7,500 — “100% White. No Negroes.” Residents later recalled a city ordinance forbidding Black people to be in town after sundown; Black travelers on Route 66 could not count on being served at restaurants in Edmond or finding lodging in the city — precisely the conditions that made guides such as The Negro Motorist Green Book indispensable.

The consequences long outlasted the cafe. No African American attended an Edmond school until 1974, and no African American family lived in the city until 1976, as Christopher P. Lehman, an ethnic studies professor who grew up there, documented in a 2014 essay asking whether his former hometown should apologize for its sundown past. In that reckoning the Royce postcard has become the standing exhibit: widely reproduced, regularly cited as the plainest surviving evidence of what Edmond was, its cheerful typography doing the work no apology has yet done. Whether the “No Negroes” line reflected Royce Adamson’s personal conviction or simply the boosterism of a businessman selling his town as he found it, he put his name and face on the card, and it advertises him still.

In 1941 the Adamsons added a 22-by-60-foot annex on the north end of the building and christened it the Mural Room for a 6-by-36-foot painting that ran across the room’s north wall. With hardwood floors, a player piano and a new “automatic record player” — a jukebox in the language of the day — the room was promoted for conventions, banquets, and other private gatherings. The Adamsons set October 9, 1941, for a formal open house celebrating the remodeled cafe.

Royce Adamson did not get long to enjoy it. He died in early 1942, and Neva took over the business she would run for another decade and a half. The wartime ads betrayed no faltering — “The Home of Good Food! Waffles Served Anytime!” — and the postcards were quietly reset to read “Mrs. Royce B. Adamson, Prop.” Alongside the fried chicken, T-bone steaks, hot biscuits, and home-baked pies, the cards made a promise aimed at the traveling public’s hygiene anxieties: “All food supervised by women.”

The postwar Royce Cafe belonged, in the kitchen at least, to Jimmy Tindall, who had married the Adamsons’ daughter, Royce Eileen. Tindall was managing the cafe by 1946, and a 1947 advertisement made the arrangement official: Mrs. Royce B. Adamson, owner; Jimmie Tindall, manager. He was an excellent cook, and the highway guides noticed. Jack D. Rittenhouse’s 1946 A Guide Book to Highway 66, which rationed its praise severely, gave Edmond a single line of commerce and included three words that mattered: “Royce cafe is good.” The cafe also caught the eye of Duncan Hines, the traveling salesman turned national arbiter of roadside eating, who included it in his guide Adventures in Good Eating.

Tindall’s specialties became the cafe’s signatures. He made a fiery chili and served it with ice-cold beer. His blue-cheese salad dressing became so celebrated that he sold it by the jar to customers who could not coax the recipe out of him. In winter the Royce Cafe poured hot Dr Pepper, a curiosity customers recalled for the rest of their lives. Pies remained a house pride — “Pies are a specialty with Mrs. Adamson,” Hines reported in his syndicated newspaper column in 1953 — and the menu kept pace with the times: By 1957 the Royce was even advertising “pizza pie” for 50 cents alongside slices of chocolate or lemon ang el pie for 35 cents. The Tindalls, meanwhile, opened a second Royce Cafe in Oklahoma City, running it while staying associated with the Edmond original, and remained in the food business for the rest of Jimmy’s life.

On January 8, 1958, Neva Adamson announced that she was retiring from the restaurant business. “In the sudden and unexpected announcement,” the Edmond Booster reported in a front-page story, “Mrs. Adamson said that she had sold the land, property, and business ‘lock, stock, and barrel’ to the new owner.” The buyer was Jim Mills, who’d recently sold his interest in Edmond’s Baggerly Funeral Home and shortly after midnight had taken over the operation of what the newspaper called “Edmond’s best known eating establishment.”

Mills lasted barely six months. Announcing that he had bought a funeral home in McAlester and would move there as soon as possible, he sold the Royce Cafe to Mr. and Mrs. R. R. McCoy, the owners of Edmond’s Broncho Theatre — the neon-lit movie house at Main and Broadway with, improbably, a hospital operating on its second floor. McCoy was no stranger to the business, having operated The Grill in Edmond several years earlier, and the couple kept the theater while assuming management of the cafe on July 1.

The McCoys — “Mac and Hazel,” as they signed their advertising — ran the Royce Cafe through the 1960s with a lighter touch and a sense of humor. “Don’t worry about the cooks, they don’t eat here,” a 1962 ad teased. Another pitched the kitchen’s latest invention, the Royce Burger. But the world that built the cafe was dissolving around it: The interstate era was pulling through-traffic away from Broadway, and the 24-hour highway trade that Royce Adamson had bet on in 1934 was migrating to the exits.

The end came in 1970, announced the way it had all begun — in a newspaper ad. “Royce Cafe (of Edmond),” the notice in the Daily Oklahoman read. “Auction—This Very Famous Place Will Be Sold at Auction with Very Good Equipment Going to Highest Bid.” After some 36 years, the Royce served its last plate lunch; its griddles, booths, and pie cases went to the highest bidders.

The red sandstone building proved harder to kill than the business. It still stands at Fourth and Broadway, one of the few physical survivors of Edmond’s highway-cafe era. (The Wide-A-Wake, by contrast, was bulldozed in 1976.) The Edmond History Museum keeps the Royce’s matchbooks and postcards, and the blue-cheese dressing that Jimmy Tindall guarded so jealously finally appeared in print in 1993, in Marian Clark’s The Route 66 Cookbook — shared, Clark wrote, by Royce Eileen herself. Royce Eileen Adamson Tindall Sipe died in 2006 at age 89.

Print Recipe

Chocolate Angel Pie

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1 (9-inch) pie; 8 servings

In 1934 Royce and Neva Adamson opened the Royce Cafe in Edmond, Oklahoma, on a corner where the traffic moving along Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles, and north and south on U.S. 77, passed right by their front door. The cafe stayed open around the clock and quickly became known for steaks, hot biscuits and Neva's home-baked pies. In 1940 Duncan Hines, the era’s most trusted arbiter of roadside eating, added the Royce Cafe to his guidebook Adventures in Good Eating, and in 1953 he used his nationally syndicated column to praise the cafe's Chocolate Angel Pie as a confection "fit for the gods," singling out its unusual nut-studded meringue shell.

Ingredients

Unsalted butter, for the pie plate
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 large egg whites, at room temperature
1/2 cup pecans or other nuts, coarsely broken or chopped
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips or finely chopped semisweet chocolate
3 tablespoons hot water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup heavy cream, cold

Instructions

Heat the oven to 275 degrees. Generously butter a 9-inch pie plate.

Sift the sugar and cream of tartar together. In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry. With the mixer running, gradually add the sugar mixture and continue beating until the meringue is smooth and glossy.

Spread the meringue over the bottom and up the sides of the prepared pie plate, leaving the center hollow and keeping the meringue off the rim. Sprinkle the pecans or other nuts evenly over the meringue.

Bake for 1 hour, until delicately golden. Transfer the pie plate to a rack and cool the shell completely.

Put the chocolate in the top of a double boiler or in a heatproof bowl set over barely simmering water. Melt, stirring occasionally. Stir in the hot water and continue cooking and stirring until the mixture thickens. Remove from the heat, cool slightly, then stir in the vanilla.

Whip the cream until it holds soft-to-medium peaks. Fold the whipped cream into the chocolate mixture until no streaks remain.

Spoon the filling into the cooled meringue shell. Refrigerate for 3 to 4 hours, until thoroughly chilled and set, before slicing.