There's more than one way to make an authentic meatball sub
But you don't have to visit Italy to learn
Craving something Italian for lunch -- like a meatball sub? Dig in, but don't be fooled. Meatball subs aren't really Italian.
The fact is, although Italians eat meatballs (called polpette), when the round, meaty nuggets in tomato sauce are ladled over spaghetti or tucked inside a sub roll, it's purely American. "You'd be hard pressed to find meatball subs in Italy," says Guy Martignetti, owner of the North End Italian grocery store Salumeria Italiana. "You'll find little meatballs in some special Italian soups, and we eat meatballs for dinner served with a side salad, but Italians don't mix them with pasta or pile them on a sandwich."
In the "red sauce" cooking of the immigrant families who came here at the beginning of the 20th century, meat was used to prepare ragu -- the classic meat sauce. Beef and pork meatballs and chunks of beef, veal, pork ribs, and sausage were added to the sauce to enrich it. That made two courses: a thick sauce (without meat) served over pasta, followed by the meat, presented on a platter. Eventually the two courses became one, spaghetti and meatballs. Meatball subs are the final derivative.
A good sub starts with good meatballs, of course. Frank Susi, who has owned the North End Abruzzese Meat Market for almost 41 years, recommends a mixture of two parts ground beef to one part ground pork; neither should be too fatty. Others prefer less pork. At Cambridge's Florentina Restaurant, the formula is beef and pork in a 5-to-1 ratio, plus bread crumbs, egg, Romano cheese, spices, and herbs. "We have three guys making meatballs," says owner Jim Turner. The amount of garlic and spices varies depending on who's rolling the meat. Turner admits to having a heavy hand with crushed red pepper.
Some meatball makers omit the bread. Bruno Galardi-Este and Isabel Gamsohn of Campo De' Fiori in Weston and Cambridge use beef and Italian sausage, onion, cumin, and cilantro, but no bread crumbs. "They're very moist that way," says Galardi-Este, who came here from Italy six years ago.
Another area of debate is whether to cook the meatballs before adding them to the sauce. At Florentina, the meatballs are first baked and then cooked gently in tomato sauce for a few hours. Uncooked meatballs simmer in a sauce for two to three hours at Campo De' Fiori. For home cooks, eliminating the browning step shaves a good 20 minutes off the total cooking time. Not all sub shops make their own meatballs. Evandro Vieira, manager of Dimitrios Cuisine in Cambridge, buys his. "We came across a brand we liked, which were just as good as homemade," he says.
Tomato sauce, however, is almost always homemade and makes the difference between a great sub and a mediocre one.
The final decision is cheese. If you add provolone or Parmesan, the cheese may just be the only part of the sub that is truly Italian.
