Polpette al sugo with rice

Spaghetti and meatballs is not an Italian dish, and Italians will tell you so at considerable length, but the story of why is a great deal more interesting than the correction.

In Italy, polpette are a secondo, a second course. The pasta comes first, dressed in the sauce the meatballs were cooked in, and then the meatballs arrive afterwards on their own plate. Two courses, one pot. That structure was never invented in order to be pedantic about it, it is a straightforward consequence of poverty: the sauce carried the flavour of the meat to the pasta, and the small quantity of actual meat was then eaten separately so that everybody could see they had had some.

When southern Italians emigrated to America they found that meat was suddenly cheap, and they did what anybody would do, which was use more of it. The meatballs got bigger, the two courses collapsed onto one plate, and within a generation there was a new dish that Italy had never made and America considered Italian. It is a genuinely good dish. It is simply not the same dish.

What is worth stealing for a small kitchen is the original logic. One pot of sauce gives you two dinners: polpette with rice or bread on Monday, and the same sauce dressing pasta on Wednesday. That is not a clever shortcut, it is what the dish was designed to do.

The technique that decides everything is the bread. Stale bread soaked in milk and squeezed out, worked into the meat, is what keeps a meatball tender. Dry breadcrumbs from a packet absorb moisture instead of holding it, and give you something closer to a golf ball. It takes four minutes and it is the whole difference.