Barbara Lauterbach, The Sun's 'Lakes Region Foodie', dies at 85

MEREDITH — Barbara Lauterbach, hospitality business owner, culinarian and writer, has died, her daughter confirmed on Tuesday.

Lisa Laskin said her mother died of natural causes after a period of declining health. She was 85. For the past six years, Barbara lived at the Meredith Bay Colony Club.

Lauterbach, who authored the twice-monthly “Lakes Region Foodie” column in The Laconia Daily Sun for many years, was born in Port Washington, New York, in 1935, and grew up in Hingham, Massachusetts. She attended Smith College, and continued to associate with her alma mater for the rest of her life, as a member if not president of several Smith clubs.

Barbara met her husband, Peter Lauterbach, on a blind date arranged by her father, and Peter’s career with Proctor & Gamble had the family stationed in various offices in Europe.

While abroad, Lauterbach embraced the opportunity. She took a course at Le Cordon Bleu in London, and continued to study cooking while living later in Italy and France.

Lauterbach combined that knowledge with a talent for the stage when she returned to the United States, Laskin recounted.

“When we moved from Germany and back to Cincinnati, she started and ran a successful cooking school in a department store,” Laskin said. Lauterbach had a way of discussing classical techniques in a way that made them approachable to novice cooks, and doing so while comfortably commanding the center of attention. She got local celebrities, such as Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench, to join her, while a crew from the local television station visited to capture a segment for the news broadcast.

In 1989, she and Peter divorced, and, said Lisa, her mother was looking for a fresh start.

“Her best buddy Maxine Glenday lived in Sandwich. She said, ‘You like to cook, you should buy a B&B.” She took that advice, and bought an inn in Center Harbor that she ran for 20 years.

Lauterbach continued her culinary career, writing several cookbooks, the column in The Daily Sun, and working as a spokesperson and instructor for King Arthur Flour in Vermont.

Lauterbach had a natural talent for performance, her daughter explained, something she honed in amateur theater groups in Europe.

“She was really able to showcase something, suss out her audience and figure out what they needed and what they wanted,” Laskin said. “That allowed her to lead an audience and made it fun and enjoyable to be a part of.”

A good performance could help lead novice cooks — or to engineer acquaintance with celebrities. Lauterbach’s social media feed includes photos with well-known chefs, and the stories behind those moments include more than just chance meetings.

One day, in the mid-'90s, Laskin got a phone call from her mother, while she was in a Chicago airport during a layover. “What is Julia Child’s maiden name? I think her sister’s on my flight,” Lauterbach said, according to Laskin. “I get a call six hours later, ‘I’m a Julia Child’s house in Cambridge, come pick me up.’”

When Laskin arrived, she was shown in and found her mother, Julia Child, and Child’s sister, enjoying cocktails together — “reverse Martinis” were the drink of the day.

As Laskin later found out, her mother had approached her fellow traveler and said, “I went to school with your sister” — something only obliquely true, they both went to Smith, but decades apart — “should we share a cab?” And from there, talked her way into an afternoon with the country’s greatest culinary icon.

Lauterbach’s less public, but equally treasured, role, was as a mother. She raised her children, Laskin and son C.H. Peter Lauterbach, while following her husband around Europe, and doted over her four grandchildren.

“She just really enjoyed food, she enjoyed cooking,” Laskin said. Her mother was a person for whom “a good meal was a good thing.”

Services have yet to be arranged.