The secret of the perfect meatball

What do you do after a bad day? I go home and make meatballs. Take half a kilo of mince – beef and pork, 250g apiece – add breadcrumbs, an egg yolk and any spices in your arsenal. The thrill of a meatball is that it can be what you fancy. 

I find meatballs especially comforting when they are slathered in tomato sauce. But it is the act of making them – the stirring, rolling, arranging the neat little rows – that brings me most joy. “Meatballs – polpette to me – represent care and love,” says Dara Klein, chef-founder of Tiella, an Italian residency at north London pub The Compton Arms. “It’s a dish that evokes memories of my mother’s hands spinning around quickly, forming perfect spheres while swaying left to right.” Klein’s meatballs – which are braised in pomodoro sauce and served with a wedge of bread – are inspired by those served at her mother’s trattoria in Wellington, New Zealand. “I love the texture of them,” she says.

My love of meatballs was once a private affair, but increasingly I find myself ordering them at restaurants. It feels silly; I know I can make them at home. But if I feel like meatballs, who can tell me no? You can get a slap-up plate of spaghetti meatballs at The Dover or a more graceful portion at New York’s Shukette. Their popularity seems to signal yet another move away from fine dining towards comfort food. 

It is the act of making meatballs – the stirring, rolling, arranging the neat little rows – that brings me most joy

The best meatball I’ve eaten this year was at the Islington outpost of Detroit Pizza. They are the simple option compared to the restaurant’s pan-cooked pies and deep-fried lasagnes, but other diners are cottoning on to their deliciousness. “They’re a slow grower, a word-of-mouth one,” says chef-founder Ryan O’Flynn of his ricotta-topped balls. “Where before we were selling six to 10 portions a day, now it could be 40 or 50.”

Meatballs might be a simple pleasure but they have a complicated history. All around the world, people claim them as their own: in Lebanon they are made with lean lamb or beef and called kibbeh; to Swedes they are creamy pork köttbullar. Italians, Klein among them, have polpette, while the Spanish know them as albondigas. 

“Whenever you have a cuisine that’s beloved to a people, they claim it as theirs – and in a certain sense, it is,” says Amy Riolo, a Washington DC-based chef and historian. Riolo traces the first meatball back, not to Spain, Italy or Sweden, but to Persia in the form of koofteh – lamb meatballs made with rice, dried fruit and split peas. “Persian cuisine was developed very early on in antiquity,” she says. “They had a lot of raw materials that weren’t available in the Mediterranean yet. They started conquering, planting things as they went along: those ingredients eventually became popular.” 

Persia’s culinary prowess was particularly admired by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, which spread its customs and cuisine around Europe. The influence goes as far as Sweden, seen in the abundance of pistachios, cardamom and rosewater. “I love that about food,” says Riolo. “You can witness so many historical and cultural moments through one simple recipe.”

Today, the meatball we know and love best is probably from Italy, where there are riffs on the delicacy across the country. Crucially, a true Italian meatball is not served with pasta: that’s an American influence. “In Italy, meatballs are a secondo served with bread as a scarpetta for the San Marzano tomato sauce,” says Filippo La Gattuta, Big Mamma Group’s UK executive chef, who adds spicy Spianata salami – and a heap of spaghetti – to his meatballs at Italian-American-inspired Carlotta. In New York, Nicky Meatballs (not his real name) serves polpette so good he’s named his restaurant after them. In London, you can get an authentic play on Italian meatballs at Polpo.

I like my meatballs with pasta. If I were Swedish I might like them with rice. Again, there really are no rules here. Chef Theo Randall has a lovely recipe for meatballs in tomato sauce with burrata and crispy shards of crostini to dip in. Similarly, in his new cookbook, For the Love of Food (Pavilion), Paul Ainsworth serves them inside a panuozzo, a kind of pizza baguette.

And if you want to get really existential, meatballs don’t even have to be meat. Riolo prefers polpette di melanzane, Calabrian meatballs made from roasted or boiled aubergine. “Everybody loves them,” she says. Sophie Wyburd’s debut cookbook, Tucking In (Ebury), uses chicken – “[they] pair perfectly with a more summery palette of green pesto” – while Rachel Roddy has a recipe that calls for white fish. Adds Riolo: “I love repurposing food. Carrots, zucchini, potatoes… You name it, you can make a meatball out of it.”

Any chef will tell you that, rather than using dried breadcrumbs, you’re better off soaking bread in milk. “We take the trimmings from the brioche used in the restaurant,” says Tom Cenci, executive chef at Mortimer House Kitchen, where the meatballs have been pieced together from recipes shared by the team’s grandmothers. Another tip is to use meat with a high fat content. “At least 20 per cent – lean mince is not going to braise well,” says Jake Simpson, head chef at The Rectory in Wiltshire, of his pork meatballs with walnuts, crème fraîche and dill. 

For a crunchy edge, Riolo fries her beef meatballs – which she makes with pecorino romano, a pinch of crushed chilli and fresh basil or parsley – in a frying pan before finishing them off in tomato sauce. The process is almost over in 30 minutes – and rightly so. Complicated isn’t a word that comes into the cooking process. This is a dish that is the simplest of simple pleasures.