Mom’s Meatballs
By Jeanne Albanese
I need to lead with the results. That’s why I’m having writer’s block about this piece about my mother’s meatballs. Because I am impatient and I want to write now, as so many thoughts and images and anecdotes about my mother are swimming through my brain, before the results are in.
This morning, my three children made meatballs for the first time, with loving oversight via Facetime from their grandmother on Staten Island. Before yesterday, she didn’t know what Facetime was.
So, I’m just going to write my way through it for now and bury the lead until such time as we sit down to dinner, dive into those meatballs and let the judges decide how they taste. The options as I see them are: 1. Just like Grandma’s. 2. Not quite, but still better than Mom’s. 3 Better than Dad’s (Easy, though Chris is a great cook otherwise). 4. Edible.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily press briefings on COVID-19 have mentioned family and food often enough these days, it inspired me to want meatballs. I love eating meatballs. Well, certain meatballs. I have a very low tolerance for bad meatballs, which in my opinion, are pretty much every meatball not made by Pat Albanese.
And I hate actually having to make meatballs. It’s messy for one thing, oil splattering everywhere, and mine never taste anything like hers. I attempt them twice a year; the night before school starts and the night it ends. My family eats them, but I’m never satisfied. I make homemade sauce often, but have basically given up my chase of that perfect meatball.
And while my mother always cooked dinner for us growing up, I think it’s safe to say she never loved doing it. She had her arsenal of basic staples like chicken cutlets, goulash, pot roast or pork chops. Basic, but warm and tasty. Twice a week, Wednesdays and Sundays, we had spaghetti and meatballs.
Ah, those meatballs. You know all those stupid quizzes that ask things like what food would you pick if you were trapped on a desert island, or what if you could only eat one food for the rest of your life?
No contest. Mom’s meatballs, always.
Every single time I have visited my parents’ house, since the day I left for Syracuse University in 1987, my mother has served me meatballs. The older she gets, the less she cares to cook at all. Most of our visits now consist of take out or visits to restaurants. But there’s always one meal, usually our last, of spaghetti and meatballs. Even if we are leaving late morning and we eat them barely two hours after breakfast.
There are a few things to know and understand about my mother. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY she doesn’t mess around. She tells it like it is, always has. I know how much she loves me, and my kids and my husband (not so much my dog), but she’s not mushy, sentimental or nostalgic. She’s practical, logical and a bit snarky. She’s not a dewy-eyed grandma whose grandkids can do no wrong. They do wrong, she tells them so. But they love this about her.
Even though I’ve known this my whole life, the first moment it crystallized for me was when my daughter was born. Chris called my parents from the hospital, but when it came time to share the name I insisted that I tell her. Angelina is named after her mother, my beloved grandmother, and I thought it would be a moment, that she would be moved. Not so much.
“Your grandmother hated that name,” she said.
Born Patricia Louise and known as Patti Lou, my mom loved Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers. She made my aunt, one year older than her and my own namesake, walk on the other side of the street because she was a Yankee fan. Mom played basketball back in the days when girls could only take three dribbles before they had to pass the ball and they couldn’t run the full court. But even still, she was a basketball bad ass at Bishop McDonald in Brooklyn and she would often play basketball with the boys in the neighborhood at the playground court across the street from her apartment building.
One Saturday afternoon, she left the family flat for a foul shooting contest. Her sister Jeanne told her not to come home unless she won. She went, she swished ten straight free throws, won a statue for her school and came home toting a huge trophy. Jeanne didn’t believe her and wouldn’t open the door. I have that trophy on the bar in my basement.
She went on to be a high-school math teacher, tax preparer, bank teller and manager. Numbers were never my thing, and we would sit at the kitchen table and fight over trigonometry. She thought I was going to fail the regents and insisted I take a 5-hour review course on a Saturday. Turned out, that day was Lou Piniella Day at Yankee Stadium. (Those of you who knew me from back then know what a tragedy it was for me to miss that.) My cousin taped the game for me because we didn’t own a VCR, I probably cried through most of the review class and I got a 77 on the regents.
After she retired, she started an investment club with her friends, all tennis players, and she named it “Net Set.” Almost 25 years later, they still meet once a month, have a robust portfolio and play tennis once a week most of the year. (Tennis, in her 80s, after her doctor told her after her mastectomy in 2006 that she likely could never play again.)
So, she’s practical, pragmatic, mathematical. And so is her meatball making.
We were supposed to visit this upcoming weekend, for real live meatballs, but as COVID-19 makes spreads through New York, socially-distanced meatballs would now have to do. So today, with her thick accent my kids get such a kick out of, she talked them through the steps. Henry soaked the bread in water while Angelina chopped parsley and Bodie diced onions. She talked Henry through how many eggs to crack, how much salt to sprinkle and just how much to mush and knead the meaty, eggy, cheesy concoction in the silver bowl. She watched as he kneaded — one hand only, so he could hold the bowl with his other — occasionally running his hands under cold water to keep the mixture moist. Every once in a while, he titled the bowl toward the screen so she could offer her approval.
At the stove, Bodie started browning the onions in the little pan she bought me specifically for meatball making. At first I pulled out the wrong pan, and she knew it on sight, making me get a measuring tape to measure the width. The pan should be no bigger than 8 inches across, she says, so the meatballs can be snug as they percolate in the deep oil.
As Bodie browned –first one half of the onion, and then the next half — and scooped the wilted bits into the sauce to leave the oniony hot oil behind, Henry and Angelina rolled the meat into balls.
“You know how big a golf ball is? You know how big a Spauldeen is? You know, a pinky ball? Well, a golf ball is too small and a Spauldeen is too big. So, somewhere in between,” she said, as she waved her hand across the screen to show Henry just how to scrunch up the meat in his hand.
She watched as they rolled and lined up the first dozen that met with her approval. Bodie gingerly plopped the first five (not four, not three, but five) into the pan, and waited until they were just brown enough — dark brown, not pale, she says — before flipping them to cook on both sides and then dropping them into the sauce. My dad got on the screen, though we could only see up to his neck, to tell Bodie he’d better not share the coveted recipe with anyone. (If there’s one person who loves her meatballs more than me, it’s my dad.)
Henry and Angelina then both took turns frying the meatballs. When I texted her a picture of Angelina at the stove so she knew all three kids had turns cooking them since we had hung up to do the frying, her response came in an instant.
“Everyone is to blame if they’re not great,” she texted.
About 6 hours of simmering, the moment of truth came. We got her back on Facetime to witness it. They pretty much did it, came closer to Option 1 — Just like Grandma’s — than I have in the last 25 years.
It must have been that no-nonsense, precise yet loving guidance. Meatballs mean love, but there’s no mush when making them, not from my mom and certainly not in the pot.