County Fare f17
By Diana Cercone
To this day meatballs are still one of my favorite foods. Perhaps even more so than pasta, they’re my all-time, go-to comfort food. One bite of these savory orbs and they ignite memories of my mom and Sunday night dinners at our house. Although her meatballs are legendary in my family—and I still follow her recipe religiously when making my own—I’m always on the lookout for tantalizing new ways of creating them. And, if they come with a family story, heck, so much the better.
Today you’d be hard-pressed to find an Italian American who didn’t have a family member known for their meatballs. Still, it’s the creative culinary skill in making them that I seek. So I figured if anyone knows meatballs, has perfected a recipe and has some great stories to tell, it has to be Joe Lombardi, chef/owner of the Italian Cucina in New Hope. As expected, Joe didn’t let me down when we met to talk.
It’s a Friday morning, around 11 a.m., when I meet Joe at his popular restaurant on S. Main Street. He’s dressed in a crisp, black linen chef jacket over black chef’s pants printed with an assortment of colorful, hot Italian peppers. (That alone should give you a little hint of what Joe is like. He’s a chef who takes the food he makes for his customers seriously while having fun doing it.) Joining us at one of the white linen tablecloth tables is his partner in the restaurant, Chef Sam Fusco, also a master meatball maker. (He’s spiffily dressed in an all-black linen chef’s outfit.)
“Back in the day, moms didn’t work,” says Joe, who grew up in Newark, NJ. “They would cook every day, make fresh pastas. And come eight o’clock on Sunday mornings, they would have a big pot of tomato sauce simmering on the stove, with freshly cooked sausages and meatballs to add to the sauce before going to church.” By two o’clock, he says, everyone would gravitate to the kitchen, grab a slice of fresh, crusty Italian bread and, dipping it into the sauce, scoop out a meatball to eat it with even before sitting down to dinner.
Then there was his Aunt Cecile, although everyone called her “Aunt Chill,” he says. Her meatballs were so good, he says, “we called them ‘picking meatballs.’” That’s because before she could add them to her sauce, everyone would pick one out with a fork—right from the frying pan—to eat. “Meatballs are great just like that—for the picking.”
Sam and I totally agree and exchange memories of our own “picking meatballs.” But one of the other things I’ve learned growing up in an Italian family, is that if you want to learn how to make meatballs, you go to the best in your family. For Joe, whose grandparents came from Naples ad Sicily, it was his Aunt Chill, who made hers with chopped beef, white bread soaked in milk, a little bit of grated cheese, parsley, lots of black pepper and a little bit of salt. Still, he says, everybody in the family had their own special recipe. Some made theirs with the “trilogy,” a mixture of beef, pork and veal. One aunt even used ricotta cheese instead of eggs.
For Sam, who grew up in Summit, NJ, it was his father, whose parents emigrated from Benevento, Italy, who made the best. He remembers getting out of going to church on Sundays so he could stay home and help his father make meatballs and sauce. His father used a mix of chopped beef, ground veal and ground pork. “But you could go to any aunts’ house on Sunday and they’d have four big pots of sauce and meatballs cooking,” he adds.
In “The Oxford Companion to Italian Food,” Gillian Riley writes, “Meatballs, or polpette, have a particular resonance for early Italian settlers to the United States, mainly from Naples [although this is also true for most from southern Italy and Sicily], who came in search of work and a better life.” To them, she says, “the abundance of inexpensive meat was proof on the plate that this was possible.” And they showed it—both in their home cooking and in the restaurants they opened. Back then there were few red-and-white-checkered Italian restaurants that didn’t have meatballs and spaghetti on their menus. For many non-Italian Americans, meatballs and spaghetti—the irresistible (and familiar to them) combination of meat and starch—was their first introduction to Italian food. Today the dish of meatballs and spaghetti is part of our culinary heritage.
That’s not to say you won’t find meatballs on menus in Italy. You will, and plenty of them. You just won’t find meatballs and spaghetti together, unless it is in a restaurant that caters to American tourists. What you will find are meatballs not only made from meat (some from raw meat, some from already cooked as a way to use leftover meat) but also from fish and vegetables and served alone as an appetizer, first course or main entrée.
Over the years Joe’s perfected his own meatball recipe. He uses a mix of freshly ground beef, an 80/20percent ratio, and Italian sweet sausage. “You need some of the beef’s fat for flavor,” he says, “and sausage gives the meatballs even more flavor.” (Joe has Gerome’s in Levittown make his sausage.) To the meat mix, he adds a blend of salt and pepper, fresh parsley, eggs and dried, plain breadcrumbs. “The eggs and breadcrumbs are for binding,” he says. He then adds garlic and onion (“for moisture”) and lots of Parmesan cheese. “If I want to upscale it a bit,” he says, “I use the king of cheeses, Parmigiano-Reggiano.”
Though the ingredients are important, they both say, it’s the cooking method of the meatballs that’s tantamount. You gotta fry them, they say. Explaining, Joe says, “You want to fry the meatballs a little bit; pan-fry to sear, so that you get a nice crust all over, but do not want to fry them long or they’ll become hard and you risk having burnt spots.” Strictly baking them in the oven, he says, tends to make the meatballs soft and open to falling apart in the sauce.
His solution? After browning the meatballs, he bakes them in an oven until the internal temperature of the meatballs registers 150° on a meat thermometer. “You don’t want any pink inside,” Joe says. “You don’t want any problems.” When the meatballs are cooked, add to the sauce and finish simmering on a low flame.
In addition, Joe says to use a light hand when mixing the meatball ingredients together. “Too much handling makes the meat hard. And always, always use good quality, fresh ingredients.”
Although I’ve savored many memorable meals at Italian Cucina, I mention that I’ve never had their meatballs. Joe takes the hint and quickly disappears into their tiny kitchen where he and Sam work their magic. And returns with steaming dishes of meatballs bathed in a marinara sauce, setting one dish in front of each of us. (One of the secrets to Italian food is enjoying it with others.)
The aroma wafting from my dish is intoxicating and I delve into the meatballs with relish. Though the meatballs exhibit a delicate crown of crust, adding to their flavor profile, they, nonetheless, melt in my mouth. And the fresh sauce is both rich, light and lovely. Before I can take another bite, Joe ducks into the kitchen, returning with a bottle of Italian red and three glasses. (Another secret is enjoying wine with Italian food.) Raising our glasses, we toast to each other’s good health, good company and to good food.
And as we continue our conversation, Joe confesses that every now and then he likes to tweak his recipe. Turning to Sam, he says, “Maybe instead of breadcrumbs, we’ll try panko since it’s so big right now. What do you think?”
Scraping up the last, tiny morsel of meatball on my plate with my fork (which took much self-restraint on my part not to just pick the plate up and lick it), I murmur, “Don’t change a thing.” And made plans to come back.
Note: Joe and Sam serve their meatballs as an appetizer or as an entrée with the fresh pasta of the day and sausage.
The Italian Cucina is located at 95 S. Main Street in New Hope; 215-862-3818.