Gather round

Meatballs on top of spaghetti is an Italian-American classic that brings people together

Nappi's spaghetti and meatballs comes garnished with fresh basil, but the secret ingredient in the meaty orbs is dried mint. (Erik jacobs for the boston globe)

MEDFORD - In the kitchen of Nappi Meats & Groceries, Anna Nappi is simmering a pot of tomato sauce with meatballs about the size of clementines. Two of these juicy rounds go with a serving of spaghetti and plenty of extra sauce. For the meatballs, Anna's husband, Giuseppe, who runs the butcher part of their shop, ground beef chuck and sirloin with a little pork butt. Anna grated stale Italian bread for the mixture, and she also added romano cheese and some dried mint, a secret ingredient her mother used. When a customer comes into the shop, Anna tosses cooked spaghetti with sauce, tops it with two succulent meatballs, and serves it forth.

But this isn't the way her family ate spaghetti and meatballs during her girlhood in Italy. In Avellino, near Campagna, east of the southern city of Naples, after the antipasto of cured meat, cheeses, and olives, everyone was served a bowl of spaghetti or another pasta tossed with some tomato sauce. After that came a big platter of meats and sausages in the sauce, which went on the center of the table. That was a separate course. No one ate meatballs on the spaghetti. "To me, it's an American dish," says Nappi, who is 48 and came here when she was 11. Like many others, however - even people who weren't raised on it - Nappi agrees that spaghetti and meatballs together is a nourishing, comforting, extremely satisfying dish. That's why she makes hundreds of meatballs in the course of a week. As a meal, spaghetti and meatballs is so appealing that at home the alluring aromas can entice family members to the table, draw recalcitrant teenagers from their rooms, and turn a weeknight supper into a special occasion.

For Italians and Italian-Americans, how meatballs are served, what meat goes into them, and just how many of the rules of authenticity can be broken are all subjects for ongoing debate. They're the opening premise of a new book, "Two Meatballs in the Italian Kitchen," by New York restaurateurs Pino Luongo and Mark Strausman. Luongo cooks the food of his native Tuscany, where his mother might have simmered a pot of sugo (sauce) and served it after the pasta. Strausman, raised in working-class Queens, learned the Italian-American foods of his neighbors, which included meatballs on top of spaghetti, sprinkled with cheese.

"What you're talking about has no basis in Italian tradition," writes Luongo about Strausman's spaghetti dish. The two have a running commentary throughout the book. Asks Strausman: "Does every dish have to have a traceable ancestor in order for us to enjoy it?"

Why spaghetti and meatballs came to be one dish instead of two consecutive courses may never be resolved. But many agree on other aspects of the specialty. One is that meatballs were invented to use up meat scraps. When farmers butchered their own animals, the odds and ends went into dishes that didn't demand specific cuts of meat. That's one reason dozens of cuisines make some kind of meatballs, including Danish frikadeller and Greek keftedes.

In Italy, a pot of tomato sauce filled with meatballs and sausage was traditional for Sunday dinner in the era when that meal was served midday. Anna Nappi says her mother, Orsola DiPalma, practiced this weekly ritual: "The first thing she did on Sunday was to get up and start her sauce. She got ready for church, and by the time she got home, her sauce would be ready." As a girl, Nappi stood behind her mother while she was frying the meatballs, and as soon as one was golden, she would reach into the hot pan, pull one out, dip it into sauce, and duck away. John LaFemina, another New York restaurateur, has a similar childhood recollection. He writes in "A Man & His Meatballs," "meatballs were the thing that excited me most about Sunday dinner. I would eat one or two as soon as they were out of the frying pan."

Today LaFemina makes giant pork, beef, and veal meatballs, bakes them in a wood-burning oven at his restaurant Apizz, stuffs the finished balls with a ricotta filling, and reheats them in a simple tomato sauce.

Italian-Americans made meatballs larger than they had been at home. And they had a hard time making their sauces as flavorful because tomatoes here weren't as aromatic. Ingredients were different and the cooking changed. Some Italian-born chefs prefer the way specialties were made in their mother's kitchens.

Luongo, the New York restaurateur, makes his mother's grape-sized polpettine from ground chuck and sweet sausages; the mixture is flattened slightly, then fried in plenty of olive oil. Public television personality Lidia Bastianich was raised on the same dish. "I remember the polpette [meatballs] from my childhood as patties of meat about 1 inch wide and flat, like a crab cake," she writes in "Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen." Bastianich writes that even tinier meatballs were layered in lasagna, which Nappi also makes with the tiny balls of meat, adding hard-cooked eggs and mozzarella to the layers.

Nappi, like Bastianich, fries meatballs in plenty of oil, then transfers the browned balls to the sauce, where they fatten up as they absorb the tomato mixture. LaFemina, with his wood-burning oven, skips the frying, but not for health reasons. He likes the flavor of the meat mixed with smoke. At home, he suggests baking meatballs in a covered dish with diluted tomato sauce. In either case, if you don't mix ground pork with the beef, you run the risk that the rounds will be dry; to prevent that, Bastianich suggests moistening the bread crumbs first.

Omit the pork? Bake the meatballs? Nappi looks perplexed when I ask about these. She began making meatballs for customers about 15 years ago, when she was in the back of the shop preparing dinner for her family. "People started smelling the food," she says. Italians and Italian-Americans who knew the dishes from their grandmothers wanted to buy her dinner. So a side business to the meat market sprang up. Today, she stuffs the juicy meatballs into crusty bread to make substantial sandwiches. Or she boils spaghetti and spoons sauce and meatballs on top.

Then she goes home and serves Giuseppe pasta followed by meat. Never together. With a hot pepper, of course.