Tiny Meatballs

Author Notes

I bought a pasta machine as a post breakup gift to myself last summer and that moment really is what started family dinner. Since that first pasta night we have done five or six and without fail, no matter when I make the dough or how early I begin shape the pasta, we will not eat before 11pm. I mostly make traditionally Italian if not more specifically Roman pasta dishes that I picked up while living in Rome in 2012: Bucatini all’Amatriciana, Ragu, Carbonara, occasionally delving into Umbrian Penne alla Norcina. I am fully a snob when it comes to pasta, and this leads us to the true hypocrisy of this post: I made meatballs. Quick recap on the meatball: Italians only serve them by themselves if they’re large, and when they’re small they usually go in soup. When the Italians immigrated to America at the turn of the 20th century they were actually spending less of their income on food then they were in Italy and thus eating more meat and the meatball “snowballed” for lack of a better word. I found a recipe for tiny meatballs last week that had tons of herbs and ricotta AND I could make them the day before dinner, so we put all prior rules and feelings about American meatballs in the bathroom. So these meatballs are a combination of a couple recipes that have all clearly been based off of Marcella Hazan’s recipe from her book Marcella’s Italian Kitchen. The last time I tried to make pasta sauce Ian yelled at me. It was arguably bad pasta sauce. Bad in the sense that it was fully edible and had anyone but me served it we all would have been more than happy, but it was bland, there was much too much sauce in relation to the amount of meat, the flavors didn’t combine right, it didn’t cook long enough, and we all have come to expect more from me. I was not going to let that happen again so I went back to my recipe hunting for making the perfect marinara sauce. Sourcing back to Marcella Hazan she claims that whole peeled tomatoes, a stick of butter, salt, and an onion, and those four things alone make the perfect sauce. Besides the fact that she’s a best-selling James Beard Award-winning food writer, her meatballs came out really good and I figured i’d give it a shot with my own tweaks. Makes 12-14 servings of sauce. Unless you’re feeding a small army or my friends that have apparently never eaten before, halve recipe or plan on freezing some of it. —Katherine Adreon Kimball