Chicken Tetrazzini is not what you expect to be handed at a food festival in El Calafate, Argentina, at ten at night, in a crowd of people waiting for a lamb to finish turning on an iron cross. But there it was. Foil tray, plastic fork, a spoonful of something creamy and gold on top.
My guide, Matias, had put it there. We were three days off the Perito Moreno trek and he had walked me into the Fiesta del Lago crowd like he owned it. Half the town seemed to know him.
He had carried the ingredients for this in his pack the whole trek, wrapped in a plastic bag, which I only found out later. Dried mushrooms, a hard nub of Parmesan, a little bottle of sherry. He had planned to cook it for the group on the last night and ran out of daylight, so he cooked it for the festival potluck instead.
Why an American Casserole Turns Up in Argentine Patagonia
I asked him where he got it. His grandmother, a hotel cook in Buenos Aires in the sixties, had learned it from an American menu that had drifted south through hotel kitchens. That tracks.
Because the dish is not Italian, despite the name. It was invented in the United States and named in honor of Luisa Tetrazzini, the Florentine soprano who made her American debut in San Francisco in January 1905 singing Gilda in Rigoletto. She did not cook it. She probably never made a roux in her life.
The most cited story credits Ernest Arbogast, chef at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco around 1905, though New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel makes its own claim and some point at Escoffier. Nobody has settled it. The first printed recipe I could find reference to ran in Good Housekeeping in October 1908, and it used turkey, not chicken, bound in a Mornay sauce with sherry and cream.
Matias did not know any of that. He just knew it was good with a beer and a long walk behind you.
Bringing It Back to a Kitchen With No Bonfire
The festival version had smoke in it. Not from anything in the pan, just from the air. Two hundred people eating outdoors near a fire pit, an accordion going somewhere behind me, cold wind off the lake. Food tastes better under those conditions and I know it.
So the first time I made it at home I was braced for disappointment. Wednesday night, rain on the kitchen window, no accordion. It was still very good, which surprised me.
What carries it is the mushroom fond. Not the cream, not the cheese. The dark sticky layer that builds on the bottom of the pan when the mushrooms brown properly, then gets lifted off by the sherry.
What I Used
- 12 oz spaghetti, pulled two minutes early
- 4 cups cooked chicken, torn into bite-size pieces
- 1 lb cremini mushrooms, sliced a quarter inch thick
- 7 tbsp unsalted butter, divided
- 2 shallots, minced fine
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1/3 cup dry sherry, fino or amontillado
- 5 tbsp all-purpose flour
- 3 cups chicken stock, warmed
- 1 and 1/4 cups heavy cream
- 1 and 1/2 cups Parmesan, grated on the box grater, divided
- 1/8 tsp nutmeg, freshly grated
- 1 and 1/2 tsp salt and 3/4 tsp black pepper
- 1 cup coarse breadcrumbs, day-old bread if you have it
- 1/4 cup parsley, chopped
Where Most People Wreck It
Three places. The first is the mushrooms.
You put a pound of sliced cremini into a twelve inch skillet and it looks crowded because it is. Most home cooks then stir constantly out of nerves, which keeps everything steaming in its own liquid and gives you gray, floppy mushrooms and no fond. Put them down and leave them alone for four minutes. They release water, the water cooks off, and then the browning starts. Ten to twelve minutes total and the pan bottom should look almost burnt.
The second is the sherry. Use something you would actually pour into a glass, a dry fino or an amontillado. Cooking sherry is salted and tastes like it was made to punish somebody. Dry vermouth is a fine stand-in. And the sherry is not a drink alongside, it goes into the pan to deglaze and cut the cream.
The third is the pasta. Pull it a full two minutes shy of al dente. It keeps cooking in the sauce and again for thirty five minutes in a hot oven, and mushy spaghetti under a good crumb crust is a sad thing to discover at the table.
One more. When you fold everything together it will look too loose, like you have made a soup by mistake. That is correct. The pasta drinks it up in the oven.
Notes, Shortcuts and One Opinion About Canned Soup
Rotisserie chicken is genuinely good here. One bird gets you roughly four cups of meat and saves you forty minutes, and I buy mine at the market on Fairfax on Sunday mornings before it gets busy. This is the easy chicken tetrazzini shortcut I use most weeks and I have stopped apologizing for it.
The mid-century version with condensed cream of mushroom soup is not the original. That swap came in around the fifties as a convenience move, and the dish it replaced was a proper scratch Mornay. I am not going to be precious about it. But a roux takes six minutes and tastes like something, so I do the roux.
Also worth saying, this is not chicken a la king, which goes over toast or rice and never sees an oven. And it is not Southern chicken spaghetti either, though that dish is a direct descendant and holds its own.
You can build the whole thing a day ahead and refrigerate it covered, then add fifteen minutes to the bake. Hold the breadcrumbs until it goes in, otherwise they turn to paste.
Leftovers keep three days. Cold, standing at the fridge with the door open. Better than it has any right to be.
What the Festival Had That My Kitchen Does Not
I have made this six or seven times since Patagonia and it gets closer each go. Not to Matias’s version exactly, since his was cooked over a propane burner in a shed behind the plaza and mine comes out of a 375 degree oven in a buttered 9×13. Different animal.
What I cannot recreate is the wind and the noise and the fact that I had walked twenty two miles that week. Nothing in a home kitchen substitutes for that.
But the rest of it holds. The crumb top goes deep gold and the edges bubble and the sherry is still in there doing its quiet work under all that cream. I texted Matias a photo of the first one I got right. He replied with a thumbs up and nothing else, which felt about correct.
Chicken Tetrazzini
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Heat oven to 375 F. Butter a 9x13 inch baking dish and set it aside.
- Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms in a single layer and leave them alone for 3 to 4 minutes without stirring. They will release liquid, then that liquid will cook off. Keep going, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms are deeply browned at the edges and a brown fond has built on the pan bottom, 10 to 12 minutes total. Season with 1/2 teaspoon salt.
- Add the shallots and garlic and cook 2 minutes until softened and fragrant.
- Pour in the sherry. It will hiss and steam. Scrape the bottom of the pan hard with a wooden spoon to lift every bit of the brown fond into the liquid, and cook until the sherry has nearly evaporated, about 2 minutes. Scrape the mushroom mixture into a bowl and set aside.
- Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Cook the spaghetti 2 minutes short of the package's al dente time. Drain and set aside. It will finish cooking in the sauce and the oven.
- Wipe the skillet clean and return it to medium heat. Melt 4 tablespoons butter, sprinkle in the flour, and whisk constantly for 2 minutes until the roux smells faintly nutty and turns the color of pale straw. Do not let it brown.
- Pour in the warm chicken stock in a slow stream, whisking hard the whole time to keep it smooth. Whisk in the cream. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook 5 to 6 minutes, whisking often, until the sauce thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
- Off the heat, whisk in 1 cup of the Parmesan until melted and smooth. Stir in the nutmeg, remaining 1 teaspoon salt, and the black pepper. Taste and adjust the seasoning. It should taste distinctly savory and just barely sharp from the cheese.
- Fold the reserved sherry-mushroom mixture and the diced chicken into the sauce, then add the drained spaghetti. Toss with tongs until every strand is coated. The mixture will look loose. That is correct, as the pasta drinks up sauce as it bakes.
- Transfer everything to the buttered baking dish and spread it level.
- Melt the remaining 1 tablespoon butter and toss it with the breadcrumbs and the remaining 1/2 cup Parmesan. Scatter this evenly over the top.
- Bake 30 to 35 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumb crust is deep golden brown. If the top is pale at the end, run it under the broiler for 90 seconds, watching closely.
- Let it rest 10 minutes so the sauce sets. Scatter the chopped parsley over the top and serve straight from the dish.