"I don’t have the evidence to back this up, but I am convinced that meatballs are the greatest food on the planet."
Stuart Heritage/The Guardian
Last night we had a birthday party for my older son and we ate his special request - spaghetti and meatballs. It was such a lovely evening, and I am pretty sure that at least some of the joy was down to meatballs.
This is not the birthday boy - it's his younger brother, cooking them at home. It's his favourite meal too. If you want to entice any of my family over to our house, all you have to do is offer to make meatballs.
Now I've written about meatballs before, so I'm not going to do the usual thing about origins and variations. No this is more a meander around the notion of why.
Why, for a start, do we shape meat - well actually almost anything foodie from fish to chocolate - into the shape of a ball? Why do people kick and throw balls around? Which is an easier question to answer because balls bounce and flat circles don't.
With respect to food I mean balls not circles. Of course we also shape food into circles and some iconic foods are circles - hamburgers, cakes, cookies, tarts and pies for starters. But a pattie and pasta - it's just not right is it? Sure it's quicker to make a flat pattie than a round ball and yes it might be easier to fry and it probably absorbs sauce rather quicker, but you can't mix it in with the spaghetti like you can meatballs. It would just sit on top. Not nearly as much fun.
Let's not just focus on meatballs and pasta though. Because as Stuart Heritage says "There are a million ways to eat meatballs.". Just about every country in the world has a version of meatballs, although I should say food balls, because these round balls are not always made of meat, and they are not always quite round - sometimes they are more oval than round and then sometimes get called rissoles. And what about sausages? One article I read stated that Turkey alone has 291 variations on meatballs, which seems a very precise number and I wondered where they had got that from. And what do they mean? 291 versions listed in some kind of encyclopedia? I imagine there are many more if you toured that very large country and visited every house. Which Rachel Roddy confirmed when talking about Italian polpette:
"When you ask an Italian about meatballs, or when they are simply offering you their opinion, one thing is (almost always) certain: their mother, their grandmother, their aunt or their great aunt made the best polpette. Beyond that, there will be some idiosyncratic idea about how exactly they should be made, or cooked, or eaten."
I tried to find the answer to how far back you can go to find people shaping food into balls, but only found that both the Ancient Romans and the Han Chinese had recipes. However, I'm sure it would go much further back than that. I also imagine that they began as ways of using up bits and pieces of whatever, squeezing them all together with something sticky that held them together and then cooking them - tossing them in some kind of liquid, frying, roasting, grilling ...
Waste not, want not kind of food, like the British faggots, that my father rather endearingly called armpit wonders. Well sort of endearingly. He didn't really squeeze them together in his armpit. But maybe long ago cave men did. Faggots contain offal - liver and hearts I think - and then they are wrapped in caul fat - more likely bacon these days, before baking in the oven. I remember that we used to have them sometimes and I quite liked them but they weren't a favourite.
The other kind of ball shaped food I remember from my childhood are dumplings - made with flour and suet, and floating on top of stews. Now those I just loved, and when occasionally I make them these days I am instantly taken back to my childhood home. It's real comfort food for me, and in the course of my 'research' for this post I found an article by Bee Wilson in The Guardian talking about the meaning of comfort food for her after divorce from a long marriage:
"True comfort food isn’t sticky toffee pudding on a cosy night in, or sausages and mash on a crisp cold night. It’s the deeply personal flavours and textures you turn to when life has punched you in the gut. Comfort food should really be called trauma food. It’s what you cook and eat to remind you you’re alive when you are not entirely sure this is true. At least, this is how it has been for me."
For her it was not just the eating of that food, but it was also the comfort gained from cooking that food - consolation food really. However, this is not really what most of us think of as comfort food is it? That is more akin to Felicity Cloake's introduction to her recipe for spaghetti and meatballs:
"Meatballs, like so many mince dishes, do seem to occupy a special place in our hearts. Perhaps it's their diminutive size, their simplicity, or maybe it's just those damn Disney dogs, but I can't think of many other dishes I'd rather curl up with on a dark, damp evening." Felicity Cloake
Which makes me wonder whether one only craves comfort food on dark, damp evenings. Can one crave comfort food in an idyllic location on a sunny day with the one you love? Probably not.
For me meatballs are not comfort food of any kind really, mostly because they do not have any connection to my childhood. We never made anything as exotic. No, I first came across the recipe, which is still the basis for my efforts today, in The Robert Carrier Cookbook at the front of which David has written January 1969 HIghgate - six months before we came to Australia. I don't, of course, know when I first made that particular recipe, but it has defintely featured in our family for many, many years. For my sons it probably is a comfort food that reminds them of their childhood. I do like them, but they are not really my favourite food, because they are a bit of a faff to make. Don't listen to people who say that meatballs are quick and easy. They are not.
An extreme example can be found in this article by Ivy Manning in Eater in which she provides a very simplified version - some would say a travesty - of an Ottolenghi recipe for Eggplant Parmesan 'meatballs', which she begins with these words:
"I went into the recipe knowing that I’d sink a bit of time into dinner: all meatballs require some degree of effort, vegetarian ones even more so."
They are indeed a tedious thing to make. You have to soak some bread in milk, chop onions, parsley, garlic, add Parmesan, squeeze out the bread and crumble it in and then mix it all together with a couple of eggs if you are making vast quantities as I always have to. I made 70 meatballs last night and only a couple were not eaten. The mixing is the easy part however, then you have to roll them into balls and roll them in flour, before frying in oil and then dropping into the sauce, which you have already made. And I have to say here that the sauce is never the same. It depends on so many things - real tomatoes or tinned, do I have any leftover wine to add, or leftover gravy, what herbs do I have ... ? Rolling those meatballs is the tedious part because after you've rolled a few you have to wash your hands because they start sticking to your hands. Easy when you start with wet hands, but not after about ten.
Mind you that whole process of rolling the balls can also be a joyful process if you involve children - well anyone really because I guess one of the joys of meatball preparation is that it can be a communal exercise. An opportunity to chat and play around a little as you go. 'Many hands make light work' and all that.
The grandchildren enjoy this, although less so as they grow older. Small children love it and you will find many people on the blog rhapsodising about the fun and the bonding involved.
But then cooking anything with others is fun isn't it? Well maybe not when competition comes into the picture. A joy with children though. They love squeezing the meaty mixture together and then rolling it into somewhat misshapen balls, and getting covered in flour when they then roll them in the flour. I suspect my patience would have worn a bit thin when I was a young mother. However, because meatballs are such a big thing for my family, back in 2018 I gave the grandchildren a cooking lesson on how to do it - as shown here. And they did enjoy it, and so meatballs do indeed give me memories of times like these. But as I said, now that they are teenagers I think they are less interested and dad has taken over.
I wonder why the British don't really have a meatball recipe? Maybe we went for sausages instead. I guess in a way sausages are the same thing, except, like those faggots I talked about they have a covering and they are not ball shaped.
So yes last night's meatballs brought me joy because of the joy that they gave my family, but not because of nostalgia for my childhood, mother and home.
"Simple, comforting and incredibly versatile." says Stuart Heritage - well yes, but just a bit of a chore.
POSTSCRIPT
August 5
2023 - Nothing on this day
2022 - A quickie on baskets
2019 - Another day off
2016 - Paris Go
How else can you score a family gathering around meatballs. It has everything, and last night the meatballs were served after the home made sausage rolls starter and followed by a delicous Apple and Pecan cake. Ahhhh 😋😍😊