Is the meatball Italian?

Yes, but also no. It's complicated.

Like many Italian-Americans, Sunday was sauce day during my childhood. My grandmother- like so many Italian nonnas- would spend the entire day making sauce for Sunday supper; it was an indispensable part of being Italian-American in the 20^th century. Our Sicilian name for the sauce was “sugu”, and the primary ingredients were tomatoes and meat. The meat came in many forms- pork ribs, sausages, even rolled steak- but the one constant ingredient was the meatball. My grandmother made meatballs the size and shape of eggs, made with about equal parts breadcrumbs and ground beef. Seasoned with parsley, salt, and pepper and baked in the oven (she stopped frying them after my grandfather’s heart attack) they were added to the sauce in mid-morning, and left to simmer for hours. By lunchtime, though the sauce was only half-done, we kids were allowed to fish out a single meatball along with a crust of bread for lunch. There was simply nothing better than that pure, perfect, noontime meatball eaten in my grandmother’s kitchen; it was, to me, the very idea of heaven. By suppertime, the sauce had thickened and we would spoon it on pasta (penne, rotini or, yes, spaghetti) with meatballs on the side, grated cheese sprinkled over everything.

Imagine my shock when, as a college student, I began reading Italian food writers who claimed pasta with meatballs were decidedly NOT Italian. These culinary authorities seemed to think the dish was the pinnacle of Americanata; a corruption of authentic Italian cuisine. Meatballs existed, sure, but they were really a minor dish, an appetizer. Nothing to pay attention to. And they would never be served with pasta, not in Italy, never. The aim of these scolds seemed to be to distance Italy from meatball culture, as if meatballs were somehow below the dignity of authentic Italian cuisine. Discouraged but interested, I began to study. And I learned that the story of the meatball is much deeper and much more complex than I imagined. And this story was maybe the first of a million lessons I learned in how foods move and transform and defy any notion of nationalist “authenticity”. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It's pretty certain that the first meatball was made in ancient history somewhere in what we now call the fertile crescent, the area of the Middle East where cattle, sheep, goats, wheat, and barley were all first domesticated. Anyone butchering an animal is left with scraps of flesh and bits scraped from the bones, which can be pounded and ground into a savory paste. Mixed with inexpensive grain to stretch and bind the meat, the resulting little balls could be stewed and served as a nourishing, delicious alternative to roasted cuts of meat. In ancient Persia, the verb “to beat or grind” was kōftan, and before long meatballs were being called “kofta” (کوفته). The name and the form of the Persian kofta seems to be the model for the modern meatball; the culture of meatball-making appears to have spread via what some historians call the Perso-Islamic culture throughout the Middle East; West as far as Spain, East to India and beyond. Later, upon the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the meatball- that is, the kofta- was embraced throughout the Turkish-controlled realm. The meatball had laid its claim to an entire geographic region.

Persian “Koofteh Tabrizi” By Fabienkhan - CC BY-SA 2.5

Walk into a Persian kitchen today and you’re likely to see a plate of koofteh, baseball-sized meatballs simmered in a sauce of tomatoes and turmeric. These meatballs might be mixed with nuts and dried fruit, flavored with herbs, and stretched with rice or lentils. It’s not hard to imagine this as the proto-meatball, the parent recipe to all the meatballs of the world. To the East, Indian kofta might be mixed with chickpeas and flavored with ginger and coriander in a curry, while to the West, the Moroccan kefta might be loaded with couscous, cinnamon, and cumin. It’s common for meatballs everywhere to be stewed in tomato sauce, an innovation that began after tomatoes were brought to Eurasia from the Americas. Draw a 4,000 kilometer oval with its center in Iran and you’ll have what I call the “kofta zone”, a region where meatballs are everywhere. This is the true homeland of the meatball- a multinational region of various cultures and languages who learned about the meatball from Persian merchants, Turkish officials, and Arab colonizers. Every culture puts its own spin on the meatball- my father likes to put pine nuts and raisins in his meatballs, a distinctly Arab-Sicilian touch. Spanish meatballs are called albóndigas, after the Arabic al-bunduq, a name for the hazelnuts which they resemble. Even Swedish meatballs are said to descend from Turkish ones, after King Charles XII of Sweden brought them back from his visit to the Ottoman capital. Consider this map I made, with various regional meatball-names superimposed on it: one can easily see the extent of the kofta zone, from Morocco to Bangladesh.

the geography of meatball names

So, Italy and Sicily are right there in the Western part of the kofta zone. The odd part of the Western kofta zone is that, unlike most others in the zone, they don’t use a word related to “kofta” as their name for “meatball”. But in all other ways, Spanish and Sicilian meatballs evoke the Moorish influence on these areas, which brought with ingredients like sugarcane, apricots, almonds, and, yes, meatballs.

Dishes of the kofta zone: Turkish kofte (photo:wikimedia), Pakistani kofta curry (photo: miansari66), Spanish albondigas (photo: Krista), Greek keftedes, Moroccan kefta (photo:Joshua Bousel), Italian polpette (photo: Giorgio Minguzzi). all images Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike

So, what does that mean for the Italian-American meatball? For one, it’s insane to think of meatballs as an American invention- the history of the meatball goes about as deep into history as a food can go, into the very origins of Eurasian agriculture and cuisine. And the story that the humble meatball tells is about the influence of the Persia in the ancient world, and the way Islamic culture spread foods to half the globe. And it shows that meatballs predate Italian culture itself, making the debate over the Italian-ness of meatballs seem trivial and petty. But, all the same, it somehow makes my meatballs taste better and grander when I eat them at my kitchen table with a crust of bread on Sundays at noon.