It sounded like a ransom demand.

The caller said he had something precious, something people would love to get their hands on. "How much is it worth to you?" he propositioned.

Charlotte B. Teagle/Staff (ENLARGE)

Local baker Angie Mosier takes a slice of the famous Rich's coconut cake she helped Carl Dendy make at his home in Conyers.

Charlotte B. Teagle/Staff (ENLARGE)

Carl Dendy reconstructed Rich's signature coconut cake with the help of a local baker and food stylist.

Charlotte B. Teagle/Staff (ENLARGE)

Detail from an old newspaper ad for Rich's bakery features Dendy.

copy/Staff (ENLARGE)

A newspaper ad from the 1970s featured Carl Dendy, who ran Rich's bakery for 17 years. He sold thousands of coconut cakes.

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Though he acted like he had Coca-Cola's secret formula, he was talking about another sweet mystery. He claimed to have the recipe for Rich's coconut cake.

Angie Mosier had gotten used to strangers calling about the cake, a beloved specialty of the department store that once seemed synonymous with Atlanta.

Mosier, a baker and food stylist, grew up in Tucker and remembers the time when Easter and other special occasions around these parts demanded something luscious in a green-and-white box from Rich's. In a city where so much of the past has fallen by the wayside — the Rich's name, for one thing — the memory of its signature treat seemed especially dear to her. In homage, she created her own coconut cake at the Blue-Eyed Daisy, the bakery she used to run in the Serenbe community of south Fulton County.

After Mosier shared her devotion in an AJC Food & Drink section article late last year, she was peppered with e-mails and calls from Atlantans who felt the same affection. They wanted to talk, swap reminiscences. "They were almost crying on the phone," she says.

Most of all, they wanted the recipe. Mosier didn't have it — she had one for her coconut cake — but she knew who did.

An older gentleman who stopped by her shop said he had been general manager of the Rich's bakery. He left his card, but in the confusion of flour and confectioners' sugar, Mosier misplaced it. She wanted to ask him about the cake, but she didn't know how to find him.

As it happened, she wasn't the only person looking.

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When Rich's closed its bakery in the mid-1980s, Jonathan Lacrosse was just a third-grader in Marietta. While he doesn't remember actually tasting any of the store's goodies, the 31-year-old Atlanta architect has heard his mother rave about them so much that he took it upon himself to sleuth out the recipes so they wouldn't disappear.

"She said it was the best coconut cake she ever tasted," he says.

Early this year, Lacrosse noticed an obituary for Dorothy Lavine, longtime personal assistant to store owner Richard Rich. He found an online condolence book and read a tribute by a retired Rich's executive who had left an e-mail link.

After briefly considering whether it would seem gauche to ask about cake at such a time, Lacrosse fired off a message.

"I wrote him saying that I was sorry for his loss," he says, "that Rich's was a wonderful store, and, oh, by the way, do you know where I can track down any of the recipes from the Rich's bakery?"

The executive referred him to the man who had visited Mosier's bake shop.

Lacrosse wrote him a letter. A few days later, the phone rang. It was the bakery man. He obligingly revealed one of the old recipes, for Japanese fruitcake. But when the subject turned to coconut, Lacrosse says, "He seemed to get hesitant. He said there wasn't anything special about it."

Which begs a question: Was there?

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Nathalie Dupree, who ran the Rich's Cooking School before she became a well-known cookbook author and TV personality, does not believe that Rich's coconut cake was the finest coconut cake ever made. She also believes such judgments are beside the point.

"It's a classic example of food being tied up with memories," she says. "People still ask me for that recipe. If you get it, I'd love to post it online."

Rich's, which began as a dry goods store in 1867, operated a bakery at least as early as the 1940s. In "Dear Store," her history of Rich's, the late Journal-Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley wrote that the bakery supplied birthday cakes to Franklin D. Roosevelt and described an employee's trip through a driving rainstorm to deliver one to the Little White House in Warm Springs.

While Rich's made everything from brownies to chess pies, it was the three-tier coconut layer cake that tickled Atlanta's fancy. It was moist, supremely sweet and practically stuccoed with coconut flakes. The cake was first served at the store's downtown restaurant — the Magnolia Room — where it topped off countless white-glove lunches. The rest of the family got to indulge when Rich's started offering the dessert for sale at its bake shops.

"People just smile when they think about that cake," says Anne Berg, a grant consultant for the Rich Foundation who was for years the store's public relations director. "I guess they used fresh coconut, didn't they?"

There's one man who would know.

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Carl Dendy, the fellow who dropped by Mosier's shop and answered Lacrosse's letter, ran the Rich's bakery for 17 years. Now 79 and recently widowed, he lives in Rockdale County in a house full of children who belong to his youngest son and daughter-in-law. He's a gentle-mannered man with pale blue eyes and a soft Atlanta drawl, and he seems genuinely amused and slightly mystified by the fondness many people have for a cake that his charges used to turn out by the thousands.

"We have a new teacher in my Sunday school class," Dendy says, "and he asked everyone to tell something about themselves, so I mentioned that I used to run the Rich's bakery. Everyone asked me about that cake. One of them wanted to know if I'd make him one."

Not likely. Dendy has made only two or three coconut cakes since he left the bakery two decades ago. "Too much trouble," he says.

Dendy joined Rich's in 1966 when the store wanted to expand bakery operations. The manager at the time believed in making everything to order and was unable to meet rising customer demand. Dendy, who had headed a wholesale bakery, proposed making cakes ahead of time and freezing them.

Richard Rich pulled Dendy aside after he was hired and gave him some pointed advice: "People in Atlanta buy their children's shoes at Rich's and their furniture at Rich's and their clothes at Rich's. I don't want to make any of our customers mad because of a problem with a cake."

With that warning in mind, Dendy's idea for increasing production was carefully tested by tasting panels. Fortunately, no one could tell the difference between the frozen cakes and the freshly baked ones.

Nor could anyone tell that the coconut was not, strictly speaking, fresh. It came from Costa Rica, where it was grated, sweetened and shipped frozen in 30-pound drums.

Under Dendy, Rich's opened more than 30 bake shops around metro Atlanta and sold 100,000 coconut cakes during the Christmas season alone. Every delectable one was produced downtown in the Store for Homes, on the same floor as the Pink Pig, the holiday kiddie ride, which sometimes made it hard to get the goods down crowded elevators and onto the loading dock for delivery.

Most of the baking was done at night. Dendy has a proof of a newspaper ad from the early '70s that begins, "In the dark hours of the morning, and on a lot of holidays, when all Rich's seems asleep, there's one group hard at work ... our bakers."

The store placed the ad, he proudly notes, after the bakery posted a 23.4 percent profit.

But even those results couldn't protect the jobs of 100 bakery employees when times started changing for downtown retailers.

Federated Department Stores of Cincinnati bought Rich's in 1976 and shut down the ovens a few years later. The flagship store went dark in 1991, and the side of the complex that housed the bakery was demolished to make way for the Sam Nunn Federal Building. Then, a couple of years ago, Federated expunged the Rich's name entirely in favor of its more nationally known brand, Macy's.

The name, the store, the bakery — they all became memories.

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Over the years, Dendy has seen several recipes for Rich's coconut cake appear in this newspaper and elsewhere. In his view, no one has gotten it right.

"Look at this," he says, settling into a wing chair to examine a recipe. "It calls for white cake. We used yellow cake. This is as different from Rich's coconut cake as potato salad from slaw."

Perhaps he would be willing to set the record straight? After all, the last line of that bakery ad ended with a promise: "And like all Southern cooks," it says, "we'll even swap recipes. Just ask."

Mr. Dendy, Atlanta is asking.

He considers the proposition and breaks into a smile.

"Sure," he says, "I think we can work something up."