Melbourne’s Matteo Bruno is on a meatball tasting tour of Italy. I catch him on the phone post-espresso in Positano where he’s sure the next few days will be dominated by pork. Which should make a nice change from Bruno’s previous few days in Rome and the owner’s intimate dance with balled and slow-cooked veal; the simple patties cooked in sugo eaten for lunch the day before were so good, he admits, that this meatball-lover ordered a second plate.
“I could imagine the nonna out the back getting the mince that morning from the butcher and finding some scraps from around the kitchen – celery, carrot, maybe some onion and garlic – and really finely chopping that up before cooking it in a red sauce made the traditional way,” Bruno romances, the restaurateur and cook in Italy researching new flavours for his four meatball restaurants that dot Melbourne’s suburbs. “Made with passata, lots of beef stock, beef bones, pork cheek and jowl cooked for hours to deliver a really rich, flavoursome sauce that goes over the meatballs.
“That’s what we’re playing with, here – that richness of veal meeting head to head with the flavours in the sauce.”
Ahh, meatballs. Who doesn’t have some version of them wrapped up in memory? Mine were Kashmiri koftes. Dad would call them “dog turds” to get a laugh (can I say that on a food website?) and lure us in to rolling dozens of the minced and spiced lamb for him to fry in a thin spread of ghee. Eaten with rice and , kofte was a meal in itself.
And yet my remembered pain of rolling a couple dozen koftes pales in to insignificance when Bruno recounts his own Italian nonna’s efforts:
“We were four boys growing up and all huge eaters and so making a batch of meatballs,” he pauses, “it was making literally hundreds of meatballs at a time.”
Given Bruno’s appetite it’s little wonder that when the TV and film producer became inspired to open a restaurant following a project filming international farmers, this good Italian boy decided his restaurant had to pivot on great wine and balled meat.
recipe makes a hearty meal. 
These from O Tama Carey have a hint of chilli and lots of ricotta to give the meatballs a little spice and an airy, creamy texture.
Source: Murdoch Books
Source: Benito Martin
Meatballs cross cultural boundaries like no other dish, barring bread. They’re everywhere. soaked in sugo in Rome. tangled in vermicelli in Thailand. bedded down with Turkish bred in Knidos. We love them because they’re easy. They’re familiar. And kneaded with onion and fresh herbs and salt and spices, well, they’re damn tasty.
And as a meatball maestro like Bruno knows, the key to a great meatball is to begin with the right kind of protein. Because when it comes to meatballs, “knowing how the protein behaves is an important part of the process”.
Having grown up with an Italian father who worked his life as a cattle farmer in Northern Italy, Bruno’s knowledge of meat and how it behaves is encyclopaedic. His condensed advice is to favour cuts that have a good balance between meat and fat – for lamb this means shoulder or leg, beef favours chuck, intercostal and shin, chicken and its poultry cousins (turkey and duck) should only ever be thigh, while pig shoulder and leg is the meatball lover’s Holy Grail.
Firm, white-fleshed fish fillets are the secret to texturally satisfying and tasty fish balls, but squid, octopus, scallop and prawn make for flavour-packed mouthfuls if home chefs are not averse to binding the delicate seafood with fillers (Bruno favours potato).
Try Matteo's recipe for
Source: Murdoch Books
Of course none of this explains why meatballs are popular enough that one man can furnish a single city with four meatball-only restaurants.
“I suppose for me the idea of meatballs as a food group is so familiar,” Bruno muses. “I don’t think you have to be Italian to understand the comfort of meatballs and I think comfort food is a pretty indicative term to relate its importance to so many of us.”
I think Bruno is right. I think packing your protein of choice with as much flavour as it can hold – no matter what your culinary roots or spice and herb palate – before frying it off in a favoured fat or simmering in a rich stock is universal cultural practice.
Perhaps there’s room on the food pyramid for a meatball-only classification yet.
