Chicken Spaghetti: A Mississippi Original?

Craig Claiborne, the New York Timesrestaurant critic, lived in Indianola, Mississippi, in the 1920s and 30s where his mother ran a boarding house and had a reputation as an excellent cook. In 1975, during an interview with WOR in New York, he was asked about his favorite childhood food. It was chicken spaghetti. The interview sparked interest in the curious “Mississippi” dish and a few weeks later Claiborne published his family's recipe in the Times. He claimed it was his mother's invention, and this variation probably was.

Claiborne saw chicken spaghetti as a distinctly southern dish and Mississippians often view it as their own, but there is every reason to believe it first became popular in the Midwest and made its way down the Mississippi River to the Magnolia State sometime in the early 20th century. Although endless variations exist, it is rooted in both Italian cacciatore and Italian American tetrazzini.

Recipes for chicken spaghetti evolved during the twentieth century, so dating the first appearance in a Mississippi community cookbook is tricky, but a pair of recipes from the mid-1920s are prime contenders. In 1926 the Ladies Aid Society of the M. E. Church South of Augusta, Mississippi produced a cookbook to raise funds for “parsonage and church work.” Two recipes for chicken spaghetti appear in the “Meats” section.

As the dish became more popular, “Chicken Spaghetti” emerged as the favored name for the dish. Using a customized database of recipes extracted from over one hundred Mississippi community cookbooks digitized by University Libraries at Southern Miss, Suwan Aryal and I were able to trace the history of chicken spaghetti in Mississippi and compare its popularity to a venerable Southern favorite, fried chicken.¹ Although variations on chicken spaghetti were prepared prior to World War II, the dish gained its name and became a household favorite in the 1940s.

Given that the first appearance of the dish with the title “Chicken Spaghetti” did not appear in our dataset until 1946, chicken spaghetti's rapid rise is remarkable. It immediately surpassed the number of fried chicken recipes in the database. In fact, its postwar popularity was so great that despite getting a late start, chicken spaghetti is the only entrée to appear in our list of the ten recipes most often included in Mississippi community cookbooks published from 1900 to 1970. All the other recipes were for desserts.

Numerous factors contributed to chicken spaghetti's meteoric rise. Initially, at least, it paralleled Americans' embrace of pasta. Once viewed as a detested, even unsanitary immigrant food, macaroni benefited from the concerted efforts of American manufacturers and the U.S. government in the first third of the twentieth century to market it as a healthy, American product made from domestic Durum wheat. Grocery stores carried pasta packaged in sanitary boxes featuring recipes and pastoral scenes prior to World War I, and spaghetti and other macaroni dishes became increasingly popular in the decades that followed.

Chicken spaghetti was not only inexpensive and relatively easy to prepare, it also was appealing to young people. In the postwar baby boom, as women found themselves caring for more children, simple and kid-friendly foods like chicken spaghetti were popular. And unlike fried chicken, a tried-and-true favorite that every young woman would have learned to cook from her mother, chicken spaghetti was new enough that people were eager to share their recipes.

In Mississippi, as the origins of chicken spaghetti blurred, it became a local dish popular at backyard barbeques and church picnics—and the most popular entrée in Mississippi community cookbooks published before 1970. For many, including Southern Living, “Chicken spaghetti is a Mississippi original.”