"Chicken Dinner" news and stories

• Vegetarians, you might not be off the hook after all.
• In which case...pass the chicken, fully reimagined by Mark Bittman.
• Tea time! A classic English afternoon tea is yours for the taking, right in New York City.
• Springtime is a great time for a little potato leek gratin. Really.

I stumbled across a list of candy bars that had their heyday well before the 1950s and have since been sent to the great vending machine in the sky. I can think of several sweets from today that should be sent to candy bar heaven, most notably the noxious Yorkie Blue Ice.

But let's delve back into the past and take a look at some candy bars of yore. At right is none other than the Chicken Dinner. In case you're wondering it was not intended to taste like roast chicken. The imagery was designed to convey the fact that the bar provided wholesome nourishment. Why Sperry Candy Co. never created a meat and potatoes bar is anybody's guess.

One candy bar that was invented with health benefits in mind is the Vegetable Sandwich. Unlike the Chicken Dinner, this baby must have tasted exactly like its name. Created in the 1920s, this healthful snack contained cabbage, celery, peppers, and tomatoes.

Nobody can accuse the makers of the Fat Emma of trying to promote healthful snacking. I'll forgive Pendergast Candy Co. for the politically incorrect name since it invented this treat in the 1920s. Pendergast originally intended to name it Emma, but when the bar wound up being twice as thick the name was changed.

There are several other bizarre bars on the list, including two named after strippers: the Sal-Le-Dande (Sally Rand) and the Gypsy (Gypsy Rose Lee). My favorite, however, is the Seven Up Candy Bar. This powerhouse takes its name from having seven connected pieces each with seven different centers. The fillings were cherry, coconut, caramel, fudge, jelly, maple and Brazil nut. Keep in mind, this thing predates Take 5 by more than 70 years. You can thank 7-Up Bottling Co. for this bar's demise. It bought the bar and retired it, so they'd have exclusive rights to their name, no matter the spelling.

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The promise of a "one dish" meal is that it will be easier to prepare than other meals because the components all cook at the same time. Some books written under this premise don't deliver, but The One-Dish Chicken Cookbook delivers 120 different recipes, utilizing a wide variety of flavors in easy-to-prepare meals. Each recipe could work for a weeknight dinner when you don't have the time or energy to work too hard in the kitchen, but they are also interesting enough that you wouldn't hesitate to serve them to company.

Chicken is an incredibly versatile meat, so it works well in dishes from every part of the world. It transitions smoothly from a very southern Bourbon-Brined Chicken with Cornbread Stuffing to Philippine Chicken Adobo and to African Chicken and Peanut Stew. The book gives some background on each dish and the part of the world that it comes from, but it is a simple book that is easy to work with. The recipes are well presented, so you won't have to second guess anything as you cook, and with so many creative uses to make chicken dinners more extraordinary, it is the kind of book you'll be cooking from for quite some time.

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