Meatballs are primarily known as well, balls of minced meat. They’re made by mixing raw egg, breadcrumbs, and herbs, and are then served over a plate of spaghetti slathered with tomato sauce. Go into any Italian restaurant in the United States and you’ll find meatballs with spaghetti, front and center on the menu. But surprisingly, this ubiquitous dish, a staple of Italian American cuisine, can’t be found in Italy. You’ll find meatballs and spaghetti sure, but they’re separate from one another. Ask for the two together, and you’ll be met with blank stares. And while some restaurants serve the classic spaghetti with meatballs, it’s only to cater to tourists. So, if spaghetti with meatballs didn’t originate in Italy, where do they come from?
The true origin of the meatball has been lost to history, but it is widely believed that the first iteration is kofta, a dish of minced beef, pork, chicken, or lamb mixed with rice or mashed lentils. Typically rolled into shapes resembling cigars, kofta seems to have originated with the Persians. The Arabs are then supposed to have adopted the food and modified the original recipe to create balls of ground lamb glazed with egg yolk and saffron. These versions likely spread to other cultures along trade routes to Greece, North Africa, and Spain.
Meatballs in Italian are known as polpette, and these can trace their origins back to the ancient Roman empire. Several varieties of meatballs made with any kind of meat, including chicken and even cuttlefish, are outlined in the Apicius, a collection of recipes thought to have been put together sometime in the 4th and 5th centuries.
But, the meatball most Americans know and love dates back to the 19th and 20th centuries, when waves of impoverished Italian immigrants, mostly from the southern regions that were rife with famine and disease, came to the United States. Here, they took the cheapest cuts of meat and flavored them with herbs and spices to create an easy and affordable protein that could feed large families. These were then paired with spaghetti and canned tomatoes and marinara sauce that were widely imported from Naples. As they were cheap pantry items at the time, they added an extra punch of flavor to a dish that was cheap but hearty and could easily be made in abundance.
While this dish was initially born out of poverty and a need to make substantial meals for growing immigrant families, today it is an icon of Italian American cuisine. You just simply can’t think of Italian food in the United States without envisioning a hearty plate of spaghetti and meatballs.
Asia London Palomba
Asia London Palomba is a trilingual freelance journalist from Rome, Italy. In the past, her work on culture, travel, and history has been published in The Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, The Christian Science Monitor, and Grub Street, New York Magazine's food section. In her free time, Asia enjoys traveling home to Italy to spend time with family and friends, drinking Hugo Spritzes, and making her nonna's homemade cavatelli.