Mom’s sweet and sour meatballs

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Ahhhh, the 1950s and 60s. Less work for mother was all the rage. It was the age of convenience foods and t.v. dinners, recipes that called for a can of this and a packet of that. Green bean casserole—frozen green beans mixed with greasy canned fried onions and transformed into mush with a can of creamy soup—became the country’s most famous fancy holiday dish.

My mother was not immune. Our pantry was never without a few boxes of Lipton’s Onion Soup mix. It went into sour cream to make a dip for chips, baked in a casserole with orzo, canned mushrooms, and butter, and her absolutely brilliant brisket recipe that has no equal in this world or the next. In fact, AARP magazine featured her recipe in their last Passover issue!

This recipe for Sweet and Sour meatballs is straight out of the 60s. If you’re a serious cook, you might think this sounds gross, but trust me—I’m a serious cook and these are wonderful. There are a few recipes for this dish floating around, using a variety of canned and jarred stuff, and made even easier with a bag of frozen meatballs. This one is a little different.

Perhaps what made this so tasty was the fact that she started with delicious scratch-made meatballs. Her meatballs did not contain onion—she always said that mixing raw onion into raw meat and cooking it together made her ill—and when I started cooking, I discovered that the same was true for me. Must be some sort of chemical reaction. It adds an extra step, but I always sauté onions before adding them to ground meat. Not only does that make my tummy happy, caramelized onions also add another layer of flavor to the meatballs. The secret to light and fluffy meatballs? Use ice water and beat the egg white.

Once you’ve made the meatball mix, all the work is done. A jar of marinara sauce and a can of jellied cranberry sauce went into a pot. She heated it over a low flame and we watched the cranberry sauce slowly melt into the tomato sauce as she rolled the meatballs and tossed them in, one by one. She never pre-baked or fried them and they always held together. Cooking the raw meatballs directly in the sauce added a lot of flavor to the dish.

If she was making them as an entrée, she made small meatballs. If they were to be an hors d’oeuvers or on a buffet, served with toothpicks, she made tiny meatballs.

Every now and again I get a hankering for this dish. It brings back happy memories of helping her roll the meatballs while she scolded me for making them too big, memories of parties and holidays, of fancy clothes, cousins, and friends. If there was one thing my mother was brilliant at, it was entertaining. Every detail was attended to, down to the individual cigarette cups and little ashtrays at every place setting. Those were very different times!

Nowadays, I even make them with Beyond or Impossible ground “beef” for a vegetarian version. Either way, the sauce comes out a beautiful rich mahogany color that makes them very appealing visually.

One pound of meat actually goes a long way in this dish, but feel free to double or triple the recipe if you’ve got a big crowd.

Ingredients:

• 1 pound ground beef, preferably 85% lean for juicy meatballs, or ground beef substitute

• ½ cup dried Italian seasoned bread crumbs

• 4 cloves garlic, minced

• ½ onion, finely chopped

• A small glug of fruit or nut oil, such as olive, sunflower, or avocado

• 1 teaspoon salt

• liberal grindings of pepper

• 1 teaspoon garlic powder

• 1 teaspoon onion powder

• 1 egg

• 2 tablespoons chopped parsley

• 1 jar marinara sauce (I like Rao’s)

• 1 can Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce

Method:

• Add just enough oil to a sauté pan to keep the onions from sticking, and caramelize the onions over medium/low heat. When they’re golden brown, remove the pan from the stove and allow them to cool.

• Separate the egg and whip the white until soft peaks form.

• In a large bowl, combine the ground meat with the garlic, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, egg yolk, cooled caramelized onion, and parsley.

• Knead the mixture with your hands until well combined. You need to do this by hand in order to get tender meatballs. A fork will not do the same thing.

• Add ice water, a little at a time, and keep kneading until the mixture feels light and no longer sticks to your hands. You’ll probably need about ½ cup.

• Still using your hands, gently fold in the beaten egg white.

• Pour the marinara sauce into a large pot or Dutch oven and add the cranberry sauce. Break it up a bit with a wooden spoon. Don’t worry about leaving it chunky. It will all melt together in cooking.

• Turn the heat on low under the pot. Start rolling your meatballs and adding them to the pot. Don’t worry that the meatballs start to pile up on top of each other. As long as you don’t touch them they will remain individual. I recommend making them no bigger that 1 ½ inches in diameter. You want them to be small enough for the flavor of the sauce to permeate the meat.

• Once all the meatballs are formed, cover the pot and cook the meatballs for 20 minutes without disturbing them. It’s important to keep the heat low so that they don’t scorch on the bottom. After 20 minutes, it should be safe to gently stir the pot with a wooden spoon. Continue to cook the meatballs over medium/low heat, uncovered, for a total of 1 hour, stirring frequently.

• Serve with egg noodles or rice if you like, or on frilly toothpicks.