Hungers for tradition of passing down recipes

Written by Joe Pisani
Tuesday, 26 October 2010 22:30

My friend Joan came to work last week and gave me a newspaper clipping about the Meatball Madness competition in New York City. It proved to me once again that a good meatball is hard to find — even worse, an endangered delicacy.

The world has changed since the days my mother slaved over the stove, frying meatballs and letting them simmer for hours in homemade sauce until they were cooked to perfection and became certifiable, 100 percent genuine Italian meatballs.

At the competition, there were dozens of alleged meatballs made from weird recipes that included venison, wild boar and ostrich. The winner was a “meatball slider” on potato focaccia, which sounded like something nomads eat in the Sahara desert when there’s a shortage of camel burgers.

Joan didn’t enter the contest. Even though she’s a purebred Italian from Jersey, she doesn’t make meatballs. Her mother makes them for her. You see, when you’re Italian, nobody makes meatballs like your mother, but nowadays, nobody makes meatballs — at least not the Italian women I know. The situation is so dire, it has become a cultural crisis.

What happened to the time-honored tradition of passing ancient recipes down from one generation to the next, from mother to daughter and from mother to son? (I had to say the “son” thing, so women don’t accuse me of being a chauvinist, although the truth is I require female supervision to turn on the stove.)

My wife, who was adopted and raised by Italian immigrants, learned how to make homemade meatballs, pasta, ravioli and ricotta pie from her grandmother, but now we buy those things at Trader Joe’s, and on those rare occasions when we have meatballs, they come from a deli, owned and operated by Pakistanis.

My sisters, I fear, serve Chef Boyardee canned meatballs and Swedish meatballs from Costco, and my daughters are too busy texting to learn the family recipes, which means I have no choice but to preserve this tradition for the sake of my mother, who got up at dawn every Saturday to cook meatballs and gravy. She always made extra because we’d be waiting to devour them right out of the frying pan with our Rice Krispies.

They’d simmer in homemade sauce, and when they were finished, our family members, friends, neighborhood cats and dogs and hardened criminals would line up for a handout. It was better than Mama Leone’s. It was better than Cipriani’s. It was better than Pizza Hut.

In later years, she wasn’t such a purist, and she’d pour three or four jars of Ragu into the pot of sauce and sneak the containers into the garbage so my father wouldn’t see them. But she never served us meatballs made from ostrich or chipmunk.

After reading that article, I decided to revive the time-honored traditions. No more Pakistani meatballs for me. I’ll start out simply and go to Trader Giuseppe’s to buy some frozen meatballs and a few jars of Ragu, but by next year, I’ll be cooking like my paisans in the old country.

Joe Pisani can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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