Wednesday, September 25th

Olive Garden? Fuhgeddaboudit!

"Attention. Here's an update on tonight's dinner. It was veal. I repeat, veal. The winner of tonight's mystery meat contest is Jeffrey Corbin, who guessed ‘some kind of beef.'"

~Bill Murray, "Meatballs" (1979)

The topic of today's conversation? You guessed it: meatballs.

What do you think of, when you think of meatballs? If you are anything like me, you think of "Lady and the Tramp," when the two lovebirds – I mean, lovedogs – are eating a hearty plate of spaghetti and meatballs off of the top of a flipped-over trash can. It turns out, though, that meatballs are not only made in Italy. Consider the following.

In Sweden, meatballs are made of a mixture of different meats with a flavoring of dry mustard. They are usually served with a brown beefy sauce or one made of pints of sour cream, and sometimes with lingonberry jam. Greek meatballs, called keftedakia, are made of ground lamb and beef and flavored with ouzo and mint. German meatballs, perhaps the heaviest of all meatballs, are made of sausage, sauerkraut and cream cheese, breaded, fried and served with a mayonnaise-based sauce. Yipes.

During the idyllic Eisenhower fifties, there was possibly no appetizer more popular than the cocktail meatball: a mini-meatball, made of meatloaf mix and swamped in sweet-and-sour sauce, sized to spear with a toothpick. And lest you think that meatballs did not make it into other parts of the world, I present kashmiri koftas: Indian meatballs made with lamb, ginger, cumin, coriander, cloves, nutmeg and yogurt, shaped into small sausagey shapes and fried, then simmered in a yogurt sauce. The shape may be slightly different, but the idea is definitely the same.

For me, as a Southern girl, meatballs were not much of an issue growing up. In fact, I was always indifferent to the meatball, suspicious of its contents and terrified of the occasional bone chip I seemed to find in every third meatball I consumed. I didn't dislike meatballs; I just didn't care about them.

Then, when I was a senior in college – that would be my first senior year, the year I decided to switch majors, thank you very much – my concept of what a meatball could be, should be, was completely changed. My sister moved into a townhouse with a gorgeously tall girl from South Jersey. Not only was Cheryl smart, funny, and a howl to hang out with, her father periodically brought her buckets of homemade meatballs and gravy. When I say buckets, I mean BUCKETS. Buckets the approximate size of the feed buckets from a dairy barn.

The first time I was privileged to have one of Mr. Messina's meatballs (for some reason, I decided for myself that his name was Vinny, even though it is really not Vinny at all), I was shocked. It was that good. It was tender and flavorful, just enough garlic, just enough salt; there must have been bread or something in there to bind the meat, but it was not bready That was it. I was hooked. I requested a phone call every time the magic bucket showed up in College Park.

Time has passed since those days, and it so happened that Cheryl came to work at my office for the summer. One day, I invited myself to accompany her on a trip home to New Jersey. To my great delight, her dad offered not only to let us stay at his house but to give us a class – a masterclass, really – in meatballs while we were there. Needless to say, we took him up on it, and spent a Sunday afternoon making not only meatballs but Mr. Messina's insanely good gravy (I was strictly instructed not to call it tomato sauce, red sauce, spaghetti sauce or any other kind of sauce, on what I think might have been pain of death).

The recipe, if you can call it that, is posted to the right side of your screen. Mr. Messina makes meatballs without a cookbook and using lots of intuition. He could tell by sight and feel whether there were enough breadcrumbs in the mix, if Cheryl and I were rolling the meatballs tight enough so that they wouldn't crumble in the pot, if we had added enough fresh locatelli cheese. He also had the brilliant notion to fry just a few smaller meatballs as an appetizer before we simmered the rest of them in the largest cauldron of gravy I have ever ever seen.

Many, many thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Messina for having me to visit and taking the time to share this recipe with me. I was lucky enough to bring five plastic containers of meatballs and gravy home with me. To a person, everyone who has tried a meatball (I share them stingily and with reserve), even meatball experts, have swooned. I can't think of a better dinner for Sunday night with the Soprano family.