by Janet K. Keeler
St. Petersburg TimesChicken salad has long been associated with ladies who lunch.
Dainty, in pearls and white gloves, they dine at the department-store restaurant on chicken salad mounded atop iceberg lettuce. Imagine saltines gingerly pushing salad onto fork.
The pearls, white gloves and store restaurants, at least those that serve more than hot dogs and soft pretzels, are gone, and most ladies who lunch now do so at their desks. They've come a long way, as has chicken salad, the new showcase of global cuisine.
Back in the day of genteel repasts, chunks of white chicken were mixed simply with chopped celery and dressed with mayonnaise. Today, recipes that include curry, grapes, soy sauce, chopped red onions, hot chilies, avocado or bacon are as common as cable TV. Forget the iceberg-salad treatment, and stuff a spoonful into a pita or wrap it in a tortilla. Old American cuisine meets New American go-go.
Barbara Lauterbach goes both retro and contemporary in Chicken Salad, the second of her trio of salad cookbooks for Chronicle Books. Potato Salad was published last year and Pasta Salad is the newest.
"It's a trilogy of cookbooks about white things," Lauterbach, 67, says with a laugh from her home in Center Harbor, N.H., population 996. Lauterbach is half a skinny state away from Norwich, Vt., the headquarters of King Arthur Flour. She is the company's spokeswoman and teaches at its Baking Education Center.
Cooking and teaching have long been Lauterbach's profession. Writing is new, a venture encouraged by friend and veteran cookbook author Lora Brody (Cape Cod Table, Basic Baking). Brody helped Lauterbach pick a topic, write a book proposal and get an agent. The result was Potato Salad.
"I wanted to stay with Chronicle and they like to do single-subject cookbooks," Lauterbach says. "We got silly after chicken salad and started thinking, 'Could we do egg salad? What about tuna?' "Someone was already writing a tuna-salad book, the publisher told her.
But chicken salad? Can the world really need 50 chicken-salad recipes?
Yes, especially when they are as tempting and deliciously photographed as Lauterbach's.
"I got 10 recipes together for the proposal," she says. "When I started going through my files, I started remembering stories."
Those anecdotes, which begin each recipe, make Chicken Salad as cheerful as Lauterbach sounds and as folksy as one might imagine Center Harbor, on the northwest edge of Lake Winnipesaukee, to be.
Cacklebird Salad is named after the large-breasted stars of Maine's Penobscot Poultry festival. Caroline's Chicken, made tart with capers, is the recipe of Caroline Russell, owner of the Village Greenery florist shop in Meredith, N.H. The Best Chicken Salad No One Remembers Eating is layers of white chicken, Monterey Jack cheese, chilies, avocados and cilantro. With all that going on, how could anyone forget?
Lauterbach explains that jet lag after a trip to China or knee surgery would make anyone's recollection of food, even delicious food, a little foggy. That's how the layer salad was forgotten.
When Lauterbach put out the word to her walking buddies and anyone else who would listen, including a grown son and daughter, that she was looking for chicken-salad recipes, she never expected that nine out of 10 suggestions would be for curried chicken salad with grapes.
That shows how far chicken salad has come from its roots as a leftover dish.
Lauterbach includes recipes for poaching and roasting chicken but also gives thumbs-up to takeout rotisserie versions. She is less familiar with frozen, cooked chicken strips because her small-town neighborhood grocer doesn't stock them. Apparently, there's still a lot of home cooking going on at Lake Winnipesaukee. However, any prepared chicken that's not overly seasoned, she says, is suitable for salad.
She explains chicken types in the book, from broiler roaster (a 5-pound to 6-pound bird) to heavy hen (a breeder hen no longer productive that's good for soups or stews). She notes that "free range" chickens are not likely ranging free at all. It's not in a chicken's nature to run over hill and dale even if it can, she writes. The U.S. Department of Agriculture permits the term to be used if chickens have access to an area outside the chicken house for part of the day.
The subtle taste of chicken makes it a perfect foil for many flavors. "It's absolutely the most versatile thing in the world. I thought to myself as I was getting deep into the book that I could replace potatoes for the chicken (in nearly every recipe)."
Just about the only food that doesn't mix well with chicken, for salad's sake, is seafood. Lauterbach tried, but didn't have much luck other than as a way to stretch a lobster-roll mix.
Lauterbach has done as much as she wants to with white food and is now noodling with an idea for an Italian cookbook, or possibly something about New England. She spends nearly a month every spring in Italy with the man she calls her "significant other" and has fallen in love with both the country and its cuisine.
"They always say to write what you know," she says.
And judging from cookbooks 1 and 2, Lauterbach knows salads, chicken and otherwise.
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