30 January Monday

Kathleen Claiborne´s Chicken Spaghetti. In one of the only times I can remember craving a leftover, I woke up this morning craving a serving of the leftover Chicken Spaghetti. Eating it last night, I thought that it was beyond magical. A wonderful treat of meat, noodles, vegetables, and cheese really fit for someone special. Or several special someones. Having made the dish, I can tell you the process of putting the dish together is pure genius.

Although this dish was popularized by Craig Claiborne´s sharing of it from his childhood and attributing it to his mother, the recipe can be found in Southern cookbooks of the 1920s and 30s, when factory made pasta was being introduced to the southern market, and they were devising ways of making spaghetti their own. Some assert that Southern cooking is the closest thing we have in the US to a formal cuisine. I never liked this idea, because I am from Ohio where there are certainly regional dishes, and living in California now, I mean come on. This recipe helps me understand the difference between regional dishes and local ingredients and the development of a way of cooking. In this way, the great Southern home keepers of the past may have more in common with the farmers of Southern France with their resourcefulness and ingenuity than European immigrants in the Midwestern US bringing their native cuisine and methods with them.

Taking the chicken spaghetti as an example, I have never encountered a method like this in any recipe I´ve ever read, any dish I´ve ever eaten, or anything else. The sauce was wacky. It was basically a creamy Bechamel stirred into a hearty, meaty tomato sauce. The barely cooked spaghetti, pouring hot broth over the entire assembled dish and just leaving it there on the counter for hours.

Fun fact- even though this recipe is a real dish user, you can have all the dishes done and put away by the time the guests arrive. I wish I had taken a photo of the foil covered casserole, quietly absorbing chicken stock on the pristine counter top.

No short cuts on this recipe. It will not work. It will not work if you only use chicken breasts. It will not work if you cook the spaghetti completely or anywhere close to completely. It will not work if it doesn´t sit and come together. The amazing this is that when you let it rest, everything is already cooked, it is the sitting that allows the dish to firm up and spread umami joy in every direction. Then, when everyone is ready to eat, ya just pop it in the oven, let it heat up and the cheese brown on top, and bang, you done.

For some reason, I can´t say why, I think this dish would be really popular in Great Britain. I can just see it being a pub favorite. They could use a little comfort food right now too, let me tell ya.

Now I have to go eat some.