Yes, I know, you think spaghetti and meatballs an Italian dish, right? Wrong! Nothing is further than the truth.
Today, I was making meatballs, when I suddenly remembered something my dad told me years ago. Spaghetti and meatballs as a main dish does not exist in Italy. If it does, it's in a restaurant just to please the American tourist's palette.
Yes, meatballs can be found in Italy. Well, not exactly like we have them in the USA, but similar. Polpettes are Italy's version of meatballs. They are made from any meat from turkey to fish and eaten as a meal themselves. Most are no bigger than a golf ball and some are as small as a marble called polpettines. Both polpettes and polpettines are made with an equal ratio of bread to meat. These are mostly eaten fried without spaghetti.
While a huge plate of Italian meatballs and spaghetti is widely known comfort food, it did not originate in Italy. It originated in America by Italian immigrants.
When the immigrants first landed in America, most were improvised and accustomed to spending at least 75% of their income on food in Italy. After acquiring jobs, earning a little more money, they also found that only 25% of income went for food.
Meats became more available to the immigrants and soon became a staple. The families began using less bread crumbs, more meat and serving them frequently. Meatballs soon went from the size of a golf ball to the size of a baseball, with additions of eggs, onion, garlic, parsley and other seasonings.
Then the matter of sauce. There's a bit of legend or maybe myth attached to the marinara sauce. The name originates in Naples and comes from the Italian word marinaro, meaning sailor.
The tale goes that when the Neapolitan wives heard of their husbands return from sea, they whipped up the recipe quickly to feed the hungry and tired sailors!
This brings us to the third part of the story. Pasta has always been more of an appetizer than a main course or side dish in Italy.
The Italian immigrants, however, with more money could buy or grow ingredients to make more pasta. Most of them made spaghetti by hand and passed down that knowledge to each generation. Read how I learned to make spaghetti here.
There was also boxed spaghetti that could be bought in city grocery stores.
There are two theories to how spaghetti and meatballs became a main dish.
The first was that American diners in restaurants became accustomed to having a starch accompaniment to their proteins. To satisfy the requests of their customers, early Italian restaurants paired meatballs with spaghetti.
The second theory is that store bought spaghetti, along with an abundance of meat, became more popular in the home to new immigrants who were adjusting to their new wealth of food. They just naturally brought the two together in one dish!
Whatever the reason, spaghetti and meatballs is a main dish invented by Italian-Americans and is loved by all!
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Photo # 1 Source
Phots 2, 3 & 4. Property of the author