Picture the Platonic ideal of an Italian dinner.
If it’s not a pepperoni pizza (which didn’t originate in Italy, by the way), you’ll probably think of a Lady And The Tramp-style bowl of meatballs and spaghetti.
It’s forgivable. Like lots of non-Italians, I grew up eating the dish too.
But, like Italian seasoning and rinsed pasta, it’s not something most Italians would ever eat ― at least, not in the way most of us devour it.
On the plus side, though, we’re only getting two things wrong; the meatballs and the pasta.
What meatballs do Italians make?
According to the Italian food and culture site Italy Segreta, polpette, which are translated into English as “meatballs,” are a common way to use up leftovers.
But they’re not the large, dense parcels we eat here; the rules are far less strict.
“Unlike many of the other words in different languages to describe a polpetta, which all have the word “meat” within them, the Italian word originates from the diminutive of “pulp”–a non-meat-related blank slate,” Italy Segreta writes.
You can have fish polpette. You can have minced veg polpette. Think of them more like the UK’s bubble and squeak than a strict recipe; though bubble and squeak is perhaps too rigid, as polpette can be stewed, baked, fried, or dropped in broth.
They’re often eaten as a separate course to pasta, and are never bigger than a golf ball; they can be as small as marbles in the region of Abruzzo, The Smithsonian says.
So... what’s wrong with the spaghetti?
There’s nothing “wrong” with it, but according to Eva Santaguida, cookbook author and the Italian half of YouTube couple Pasta Grammar, “the problem with spaghetti and meatballs is in the kind of dough of spaghetti.”
“Usually, when... we eat meat sauce with pasta, the pasta... is a fresh egg pasta,” she went on to explain.
Most spaghetti we eat at home is the dried kind; to stay usable for that long, it can’t contain perishable ingredients like egg.
Eva added, “I’m not against pasta [and] meatballs; but here the question is, which pasta, and which meatballs?”
She points to spaghetti alla Teramana as the closest dish Italy has to the Italian-American spaghetti and meatballs; though with its fingernail-sized polpette absent of breadcrumbs or egg, spiced with nutmeg and cooked in butter, it’s far from the dish we’re used to.