Spaghetti with Meatballs

Ciao a Tutti,

today’s post we’ll be more than simply interesting because I chose to finally talk about Spaghetti with Meatballs, the most not-Italian, iconic, stereotyped, and famous Italian-American dish.

My first experience with it was when I was very little, I was watching a

beautiful Disney movie, called The Lady and The Tramp, and as many of you will remember there there is the romantic kiss scene thanks to a “spaghetto” (with meatballs). Now, at first I remember I was amused and as a kid, a little moved but then – after the third/forth times – I focus my attention on that plate and I realized that I had never seen such a sauce for pasta. But I said it was a movie so “not real” because why should they put those big balls in the plate when you’re still eating pasta?! – unlikely, few years later, I realized that that was a proper way to do it in a far away land, called USA.

Now, I want to answer this question once and for all. In Italy, meatballs are called “polpette” and they are, of course, cooked with tomato sauce but not served with pasta. Because it is a second course, so it comes after you finish eating the first dish which is pasta with the same sauce you used to cook the polpette. Every type of meat you cook with the tomato sauce is served after the pasta, not with it. It is true that you might used the same plate in which you ate pasta but still … no, you can’t eat it together! Also, my region is one of those where polpette are made in many different ways – I’m an expert about it even if I’m vegetarian! So, it’s fair enough to eat tiny small polpette with pasta with tomato sauce just when those meatballs are as I said tiny and small! It’s

a variation of the “ragù alla Bolognese” (the label “Bolognese sauce” doen’t exist, but I will talk about it in another post) where little pieces of meat are cooked together
with the tomato sauce. Or, again, on Christmas day in my region is very common to prepare “Brodo di Natale” which has cardoon, endive, stracciatella (similar to egg drop soup), and finally little meatballs. That’s it! All you have to know about Italian meatballs that it is also confirmed by Corby Kummer:

For whatever reasons, what became Italian-American cuisine started with a base of Campanian food, minus many kinds of vegetables and cheeses and plus a lot of meat. Thus the rise of spaghetti and meatballs, a dish unknown in Italy. It probably had its origin in several baked Neapolitan pasta dishes, served at religious festivals such as Carnival and Christmas, that used meatballs no bigger than walnuts and also called for such ingredients as ham and boiled eggs.

What happened in the States is always a matter of convenience (and laziness I suppose) because of the habit of putting everything in the same plate, with no particular order for first, second, side or other courses. But to go deeper, I wanted to find something more than that and I find myself shocked to acknowledge that Spaghetti and Meatballs has its own English Wikipedia page where I read that

It is widely believed that spaghetti with meatballs was an innovation of early 20th-century Italian immigrants in New York City; the National Pasta Association (originally named the National Macaroni Manufacturers Association) is said to be the first organization to publish a recipe for it, in the 1920s.

So, now, my fella Americans I will end my post with a link to the best (online) recipe for real meatballs – it’s in Italian but there are lots of

images to help you through the process and some online dictionaries will do the rest!
Try it and let me know! But do not serve it with pasta or as a very weird hotdog, please!

Ciao Ciao!