Episode: 3571
Title: HPR3571: The Meatball Mystery
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3571/hpr3571.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:34:38

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,571 from Monday the 11th of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled The Meatball Mystery.
It is hosted by Windigo and is about nine minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, a naming oddity leads to questions about genealogy and American history.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, this is Windigo and HPR is, as it often is, low on shows.
So while you think about the episode that you're going to record to fill up the queue, I can
tell you a story about Spaghetti and Meatballs.
One thing I've discovered about being a parent gives you opportunities to reassess your preconceptions.
Quite a bit actually.
While explaining past names, I had one of these revelations.
I was going through the different varieties of pasta available with my daughter Spaghetti,
Linguini, Vermicelli, Ziti, Farfale, Lasagna, Penne.
I kept going with various Italian foods explaining that they had Italian names because they came
from Italy, like Stromboli, Calzone, Pizza, Marinera, Bones, Meatballs, Meatballs.
Wait a second, I realize I had no explanation to why we have dozens of Italian foods with
various Italian-sounding names, but Meatballs, Meatballs, where did that come from?
So a little background.
My mother's family, the Orcini's, immigrated from Italy a few generations ago.
My cousin has done some genealogy work, so I did a quick search for some distant ancestors
in the Ellis Island databases.
Ellis Island is home of the Statue of Liberty, and what's the gateway for many immigrants
that populated my area of America.
I came from Northern New York, and a lot of us can trace our ancestors right back to New
York City.
So in my research, I think I found a record of my ancestor who arrived here in 1897 to
Teresa DiPillo.
The ship she rode over on was scrapped the same year, which does give me a little bit of
perspective about why my mother's vehicles always end up in the condition that they are
in.
Apparently, our family has a tradition of riding their transport straight into the ground.
But anyways, one of the things we have passed down through our family is our Meatball
Recipe.
My grandmother was famous for the meatballs she made.
My grandmother learned how to make meatballs from my great-grandmother Josephine, who started
out as a neurone before she married into the Orcini family, and great-grandmother Josephine
was taught by my great-great-grandmother Teresa, who married into the neurone family.
And I've learned to make them myself.
It would be simpler to try and get my encryption keys out of me than to get me to give up the
recipe for Orcini family meatballs.
But Meatballs?
Just doesn't sound like a classic Naples dish, does it?
Maybe the Italian word for meatballs was too complicated to be integrated into our American
vernacular?
Well, it turns out there are meatballs in Italy.
They're called Polpete.
They're much smaller than the meatballs that I'm used to, and they are never served with
marinara.
They're served plain and can be made with many different types of meat.
From turkey to fish, the combination of spaghetti and meatballs, however, is not a native Italian
dish.
In my experience, meatballs are always served with some form of sauce and longer pasta.
So spaghetti being the gold standard, but it would not be unheard of to see meatballs
with linguini or other thinner noodles, but meatballs aren't usually served with marinara.
In fact, not only usually, but they should be cooked in it, or else your invitation to
the family reunion gets revoked.
So where did this traditional spaghetti and meatball combo come from that's been passed
down through my family?
It just so happens as I was able to find out that it came from America.
Specifically, Italian immigrants.
Apparently, one of the side effects of traveling to America was that your food budget was less
and less of your total income.
In Italy, you had to spend 75% of your income on food, but once my ancestors immigrated
to America, food only took up 25% of their income.
I'm not sure if Italy just had much higher food prices or the opportunities in America
allowed Italian immigrants to make more money, but the result was that food was not nearly
as much of your total income.
And this wasn't just Italian immigrants either.
This had the effect of transforming corn beef from an occasional luxury to a staple of
Irish American diets.
With this change in economics, the focus shifted from being able to find enough nutrition
to survive to a full-blown bake-off, and striving to be the best cook of the neighborhood,
the bullpete, which is usually small and made of half bread and half meat, became much larger,
and the meat ratio increased.
So that explains where meatballs have come from, but there's still a couple pieces to
the puzzle we're missing.
Where did the spaghetti and marinara come in?
So it turns out marinara, as a sauce, has roots in naples.
Marinara originated as marinara, and I'm pretty far from Italy at this point, so my pronunciation
is probably terrible, but marinara means sailor sauce, because it is apparently easy and
quick to make.
So when the sailor's wives would see their husband's ship pulling, they had a chance
to make sauce for dinner.
It gained popularity among Italian American immigrants, not because it was quick and easy
to make, although knowing my Italian American ancestors, that certainly did not hurt.
But because tomatoes were available in the grocery store, you would get a can of tomatoes
where a lot of other Italian ingredients probably weren't as available.
So if you can get garlic and tomatoes in a lollavoyle, bam, you've got marinara.
Spaghetti had a very similar reason for becoming part of the trio.
Spaghetti was available in grocery stores.
You probably didn't have the variety that we do now, but spaghetti is easy to manufacture,
I would assume, because it's just a big old string of pasta.
So it was available in the grocery stores that these Italian immigrants had access to.
So that is the story of why spaghetti and meatballs is a dish.
It's definitely labeled Italian food in our restaurants in America, but it is most certainly
an Italian American dish in origin.
Of course, spaghetti existed in the concept of a meatball had been well established.
But the Italian American immigrant were the one that combined it.
It's the Arnold Palmer of fine dining, I suppose.
For those of you that haven't experienced an Arnold Palmer, it is a beverage made of
iced tea and lemonade.
And you know, now that I think about it, I don't know where that came from either.
You'd have something to do with Arnold Palmer, anyhow.
I discovered this fascinating information thanks to my daughter, bringing up questions,
and Shalen Esposito, writing for a Smithsonian magazine.
I will put a link to her excellent article in the show notes.
Now, if there was ever any question whether or not you could record an HPR episode yourself,
I would like to think that my spaghetti and meatballs episode put the bar just, just
low enough to get everybody under.
So please record an HPR episode and let's fill up that queue a little bit.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio, does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself, if you ever thought of recording
a podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
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and our sims.net.
On the Sadois stages, today's show is released on our Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
License.
