To Americans, the word “meatball” typically conjures up an image of a big plate of spaghetti topped with large spheres of ground meat and rich, spicy tomato sauce - the Italian-American version of this culinary delight. The word “meatballs” refers quite simply to "any combination of raw or cooked meat shaped into balls." The first appearance of this description dates back to the 1830’s when it started popping up in the Oxford English Dictionary. However, the creation of the meatball dates back to ancient times. As soon as man was domesticating animals and therefore looking for ways to cook and preserve food, he was chopping meat and mixing it with other ingredients.

Today’s meatball, its brother the meatloaf, its cousin the sausage and other members of the “forcemeat” family began as some of our earliest recorded recipes. The ancient Roman cookbook author Aipicuis lists several recipes resembling meatballs in his ancient text. One can also assume that since each culture boasts at least one delicious meatball recipe among its traditional dishes that cultures spanning the globe were mixing up meatballs at the beginning of their civilizations. Why? Well, first, chopping meat and combining it with “extenders” like bread crumbs, rice and potatoes is an economical way to serve meat – and ingredient that some cultures still view as a precious commodity. Second, the mixture of chopped meat with other ingredients allows the creative means to use up food that would otherwise be wasted – stale bread, bits of cheese, and small pieces of cooked vegetables. Finally, by chopping meat and combining it with other ingredients, tough cuts of meat that might otherwise require long cooking times or other culinary techniques to become edible are transformed into something quickly palatable.

While Americans recognize meatballs saddled alongside pasta, the rest of the world is serving up a wide variety of flavors in this simple sphere. Turkey for instance boasts more than 80 different meatballs. In China, meatballs are commonly made with pork and are steamed or boiled instead of fried. The Greek enjoy fried meatballs, keftedes, commonly made from lamb and spiked with mint. In Indonesia, meatballs are bakso and are usually floating in a noodle soup. Swedish meatballs, köttbullar, can be made from all beef or a combination of beef and pork mixed with breadcrumbs, milk and chopped onion. Italian meatballs are called polpette, but it is Italian-American chefs that paired them with spaghetti and tomato sauce sometime in the early 1900s, presumably to please the American’s appetite for meat at every meal.