The first chicken tetrazzini recipe to appear in the Fredericksburg PTA’s cookbook showed up in the 10th edition, published in 1971 and was submitted by Mrs. Clarence Allen. The next edition shortened its name simply to Tetrazzini. Then, in the 12th, Mrs. Allen’s recipe quietly disappeared, replaced by a chicken or turkey tetrazzini from Mrs. Tommy Thompson and Mrs. Clinton Feuge.
All three versions eventually found their way into the city’s 150th celebration cookbook in 1996. The fact that it took six decades of PTA cookbooks before tetrazzini appeared at all speaks to how it was viewed. Perhaps it was finally time for the PTA to catch up, or maybe chicken’s fast-rising popularity in American kitchens made it too prominent to ignore any longer.
In 1930, Americans ate about 10 pounds of chicken per person each year. Today that figure hovers around 80 pounds. Meat rationing during WWII and the high price of chicken in earlier decades had kept it from being a common dish on everyday dinner tables.
In 1900, chicken cost 50 cents a pound while beef was only nine cents. When beef became harder to find during the war, chicken producers stepped in, and flocks grew quickly. By 1950, chicken was down to about 23 cents a pound while beef had climbed to 93 cents. Chicken had become America’s new beef— affordable, abundant and ready for new recipes.
Finding my sister Jeanette’s handwritten chicken tetrazzini recipe among our mom’s collected favorites didn’t surprise me. Jeanette loved exchanging recipes, and many she sent home were typed — then later xeroxed — on a Sam Houston State University’s copier.
She was a professor in kinesiology, the modern term for what used to be P.E. She had been at Sam Houston since 1959 and loved entertaining her colleagues with dinners. While Mom saved the recipe faithfully, I cannot recall her ever making the dish.
Tetrazzini is often described as an Italian-American creation. It’s neither Italian nor traditional. It originated somewhere between 1908 and 1910, when chefs delighted in naming dishes after famous people, nationalities, events or performers.
In Europe, it was tradition after concerts to hold a late-night souper where performers mingled with concertgoers, talked, ate and celebrated. It wasn’t unusual for a popular performer to have a dish named in their honor. How many of these celebrities appreciated the gesture — or even knew it had happened — is doubtful.
Two American cities lay claim to tetrazzini’s birth. San Francisco holds the earlier date, around 1905, when the Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini was performing at the Palace Hotel. The hotel’s chef, Ernest Arbogast, created the dish to honor her, although no newspaper of the time recorded such an event. More telling, Luisa never mentioned the dish in her 1921 autobiography, “My Life of Song.” The omission casts a long shadow over San Francisco’s claim.
New York City offers a somewhat stronger case. In 1908, Good Housekeeping magazine noted that two restaurants — Lorber’s, across from the Metropolitan Opera, and the Knickerbocker Hotel — were serving dishes named for Tetrazzini.
Chef Pavani of the Knickerbocker claimed he created his version “to please the palate of the famous coloratura soprano.” But once again, Luisa herself never acknowledged it, and may never have known the dish existed. Italy itself had no such creation, though chicken was popular there. Turkey, on the other hand, was a New World bird, unknown to her in that context.
Regardless of its murky origins, tetrazzini settled into the American kitchen. Today it is made with chopped chicken or turkey baked in a casserole dish with toasted breadcrumbs on top. The sauce varies, but most include sherry or white wine, mushrooms, garlic, onions, Parmesan cheese and a silky béchamel made from a butterflour roux enriched with broth, cream or milk. It is served over spaghetti and browned lightly under the broiler.
By the 1950s, American kitchens were changing faster than at any other time in our history. Chickens were physically larger. In 1950, a dressed bird averaged about three pounds. By the year 2000, that average had climbed to four and a half pounds.
In 1961, one publication described it as a popular company dish that also appeared on family menus. It was celebrated for being made ahead of time — important to the busy women of the era. It was praised as the perfect casserole for an informal buffet or for keeping warm until guests arrived.
Poppy Cannon, in her spirited 1968 cookbook “The New Can-Opener Cookbook” called tetrazzini a “delightful combination” with the “advantage of being simple and easy to prepare — and economical, too.”
From the 1960s into the 1970s, the dish reached its peak popularity. It remained a celebrated way to use leftovers and a legitimate entrée even for more formal occasions. It was described as “a gourmet way to use leftover chicken or turkey.”
Tetrazzini, once the darling of millions of American homemakers, is rarely featured today in major cookbooks. Cook’s Illustrated magazine, published since 1996 does not include a single tetrazzini.
The dish is still widely made, just more quietly and it did enjoy a brief and unexpected spike in popularity around 2010 when a woman claimed online that her boyfriend had been lured away by another woman’s tetrazzini. The internet has a way of resurrecting old things in surprising ways.
Jeanette’s handwritten recipe reminds me how food moves through families. One person makes it, another saves it, a third remembers it fondly and passes it along, even if it never made it to the dinner table.
Tetrazzini’s story is much the same: A dish that rose, fell, rose again and still lingers on our recipe cards and in our kitchens. It is proof that leftovers can have their own kind of glory.
