Comforting Discomfort Food

Or: How to Make a Meatball

There’s something very comforting about a meatball. They are even more comforting when found in large groups.

Not to vegetarians or vegans or the sfairesphobic perhaps, but they are to me.

There are dozens of different kinds of meatballs in which one might take solace: Indonesian bakso or Dutch bitterballen, Danish frikkeneller or British faggots, there’s a warm orb of ground meat for nearly every taste on every continent. I include Antarctica in this list because I hear the underground canteens there are fantastic.

There’s something very satisfying about making a meatball. There is even more satisfaction when making them in large batches.

Maybe it’s the feeling of cold, minced meat and egg yolk squishing through clean fingers or the action of rolling and forming it all into near-perfect spheres or the godlike power of reshaping flesh and bending it to your will.

My favorite meatball is what many people think of as an Italian meatball, though I would imagine actual Italians might take issue with this. But I am four generations removed from Italy, so I don’t really care.

My grandmother—whose parents emigrated from Sicily— made fantastic meatballs. She grudgingly passed the recipe on to my WASP mother because, as far as she was concerned, that white girl wasn’t going to take her darling son away from her without at least knowing how to feed him properly.

Yes, she actually referred to my mother as “that white girl”. My grandmother was a cold, jealous, and very unhappy woman.

She later taught my stepmother how to make her meatballs. Blonde, attractive, affectionate, and Minnesota nice, my stepmom was everything my grandmother was not. And although I never heard Grandmom utter a word against Holly, I knew she didn’t much like her because Grandmom didn’t like outsiders.

Anyone who was not of her own flesh and blood was an “outsider”.

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Again, the woman made beautiful meatballs but I always sensed they were a transactional commodity. Eating them felt like a sort of bargain: “If you eat this food I spent all day making for you, you have to love me.” Cooking was one of the few ways she could express affection and, though I couldn’t articulate it as a child, I understood it and digested it.

When my mother made my grandmother’s meatballs, she was often tired from working and not happy about preparing a meal originally taught to her by a woman she didn’t like for the purpose of feeding a man she was no longer married to. Still, she’d sometimes make a huge batch of them on a Saturday, simmer them in her former mother-in-law’s tomato sauce, then freeze them in large Country Crock margarine tubs to later thaw out and consume over the weeks to come. She hated being in the kitchen, so cooking for her was a mechanical process done for a purely practical reason: to get her kids fed.

My stepmother, on the other hand, loved being in the kitchen. She didn’t often make the meatballs or any other Italian-related foods, but when she did, I could feel her unease— a sort of internal tug-of-war between her deep-rooted need to please and the unshakable sense that she would always be an outsider in our family.

Three different woman used the same recipe with more or less the same level of technical success, and each of them managed to add to the family meatballs something that was missing from the handwritten, laminated recipe card—a slight-but-perceptible taste of sadness. Or was it resignation?

I often get those flavors confused.

I like ‘em big. 125g big. Their weight is the only thing I ever measure.

When I moved into my first apartment in college, My stepmother made a copy of the family meatball and sauce recipes. I’ve still got it in a drawer somewhere but in the thirty-plus years it’s been in my possession, I have never, ever used it because I don’t see the point of making sad food on purpose.

I’ve made plenty of accidentally sad food, but that’s just part of living and learning I’d say.

Instead, I decided to go down my own meatball road, which is an apt thing to write because my first several batches could have been used as cobblestones.

But over the years, my meatballing has gotten better and better as I become more attuned to my own tastes and am introduced to different techniques which appeal to me.

I started out using only beef until I understood adding ground pork made them more tender (and that ground veal was too expensive for my budget— meatballs are not rich people food by nature).

Learning to add panade (a paste made of breadcrumbs and milk) not only increased the tenderness of my meatballs, but gave me a slightly larger amount of them to consume.

Perhaps the greatest technical leap of all came from my friend Shannon, who is about as genetically different from an Italian as a comb jelly is to a giraffe. She had the nerve to make spaghetti and meatballs one evening for dinner and I noticed her simply rolling to balls between her palms and depositing them raw directly into her bubbling tomato sauce. I asked her why she was doing such a thing with what I assume was a poorly concealed tone of disapproval. Shannon, who is queen of the cocked eyebrow stink eye, said (and I am heavily paraphrasing), “Well, I’m lazy and browning them is a waste of time and this way I don’t get fat spattering all over the stovetop.”

My attitude remained dubious because of my half-Italian pride but honestly I added this time/mess-saving approach to my next batch and have used it ever since and my balls have only gotten better.

As a result, my meatball game is pretty fantastic, and they’ll only get better over time, and I very much doubt I will ever write down the recipe for one very important reason:

There isn’t one. The only thing I measure is the weight. 125 grams, to be exact. My meatballs are bigger than my grandmother’s meatballs.

You now understand why I offer no recipe.

Meatballs are a feeling. An attitude. Meatballs are an expression of self. At least, that’s what I tell my reflection as I clean the stovetop after making them. They are about technique and proper seasoning. When made correctly, a meatball is a forgiving thing with tenderness at its core.

My meatballs are better than my grandmother’s meatballs. To me, at any rate. They are better to me because they are not hers nor my mother’s nor my stepmother’s. They are meatballs untethered to family. They are meatballs made without a trace of nostalgia. Or sadness, for that matter.

My meatballs are too good to be wasted on pasta, which should please any actual Italian readers in the audience.

I like my meatballs served on a bed of ricotta and showered with Pecorino and parsley.

My meatballs are 50% beef, 50% pork, and 100% comfort in both eating them and knowing they are the result of my own effort.

There is only one drawback to my meatballs: There is incredible discomfort in eating too many.

What’s your favorite comfort food? I’d like to know because I have the feeling we’re going to have to comfort each other a lot in the next few years.