Along with pizza and spaghetti with tomato sauce, meatballs must be the most internationally recognized Italian food. The meatballs found in the US and then that spread around the world are derived from recipes of the millions of immigrants that came through Ellis Island to the US from Naples and Southern Italy in the 1920s.

But meatballs in “Italian-American” food have been corrupted. When those Italian immigrants came to the US and found the plentiful meats at low prices, they decided richness, wealth and status was an opposite to the practice of adding bread to meatballs to “stretch” them; to feed a large family on a little meat.

Continue reading Neapolitan Meatballs: Polpette alla Napoletana at Our Italian Table.