I grew up in northern and central Italy, where we did not have "spaghetti and meatballs." It was an unknown dish and one which, if mentioned, elicited puzzled frowns from our Italian friends, followed by sad, sympathetic smiles. I moved to the US just on the cusp of a movement in which “real” Italian food was being embraced, explored, and celebrated, but the predominant Italian food most people knew was Italian-American food, a mishmash of bastardized recipes that, for me, was unrecognizable as Italian food.
I swore up and down that pasta with meatballs did not exist anywhere in Italy, that it illustrated how poor Italian immigrants of yore were so dazzled by the wealth and abundance of American food, that they simply added meat to everything in one form or another. Then, I went to Puglia for the first time, a place known for serving orecchiette pasta with bitter greens. My first night in the gorgeous baroque city of Lecce, a group of us chefs stumbled into a tiny trattoria that looked to be serving authentic food. There, we were served a classic dish, orecchiette in tomato sauce with a few tiny but intensely delicious veal meatballs, which were mixed with garlic and the scrubby oregano that grows wild in the southern Mediterranean.
While I find classic American spaghetti and meatballs an unwieldy and poorly balanced dish, the meatballs too big to tangle with the thin pasta, this dish made sense, with tiny meatballs nestling perfectly into the orecchiette. The key to meat in pasta is that the meat, be it guanciale or pancetta or sausage crumbles, needs to be in every bite, without demanding attention or overpowering the taste of the dish. I was delighted to add something so tasty to my repertoire, and excited to find an origin story (of sorts) for spaghetti and meatballs, that iconic dish of Italian-Americans.
A meatball for every orecchiette!Photo by James Ransom
I like to make the dish with lamb meatballs because lamb is such an iconic meat in Italy, and one of my favorites for its pronounced, slightly gamey flavor. At my restaurant Porsena, we get merguez-y with it, adding some coriander and dried ginger to the mix. But no matter the meat, I always keep the size of the meatballs tiny, as it’s that balance between meat, pasta, and sauce I find irresistible about this dish.
Yum yum yum. One of my favorite pasta recipes is from Franny's in BK—http://www.foodrepublic.com/recipes/rigatoni-with-spicy-salami-and-tomato-recipe/ - and instead of chunks of salami I make lots of tiny meatballs out of spicy italian sausage. The end result is 70% meatballs 30% pasta and that's the way I like it.
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