This Chicken Spaghetti Recipe Is Southern Hospitality in a Bowl

Food writer Lisa Fain, known as the Homesick Texan, characterizes the Tex-Mex version she knows best as “baked pasta with chicken and chile con queso.” The earliest recorded recipe Fain found dates back to 1931, published in the Amarillo Daily News, featuring a simple combination of chicken, cheese, noodles, and a liberal dose of chili powder.

Later versions included canned cream of mushroom soup, Velveeta, and sometimes a tomato product like Ro-Tel—products of the midcentury convenience-food boom that dominated American food culture for decades.

But this casserole’s history isn’t limited to Texas. Famed New York Times food editor and restaurant critic Craig Claiborne shared his mother’s version in his 1987 book, Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking. His mother, Mary Kathleen Claiborne, was “famous for [her version] up and down the Mississippi Delta.”

Inspired by these and other historical and contemporary versions of the dish, we hit the kitchen to develop our own recipe. We started by snapping dried spaghetti in half to make it easier to serve and eat. After boiling it to al dente, we gave it a rinse to slough off excess sticky starch and set it aside. We used the same (now-empty) pot to create a creamy sauce with butter, flour, chicken broth, and half-and-half flavored with mushrooms, onion, bell pepper, and cayenne pepper.

Adding American and cheddar cheeses to the mix created an ultracreamy sauce with big flavor, just perfect to coat the shredded chicken. (About that chicken: We loved the convenience of tearing it straight from a store-bought rotisserie chicken, but if you’d rather roast your own, by all means do.) We added back the cooked noodles and then transferred it all into a baking dish and baked it until it bubbled.

With one more sprinkle of cheese melted over the top, the final dish is irresistible and deeply comforting—a warm, Southern-style welcome for any loved one at the table.