Simple, comforting and versatile – are meatballs the greatest food on the planet? Try these dishes and decide for yourself
I don’t have the evidence to back this up, but I am convinced that meatballs are the greatest food on the planet. There is a reason why so many countries have their own variations on the dish (Turkey alone has at least 291 versions): because they are simple, comforting and incredibly versatile. There are a million ways to eat meatballs. You can eat them with pasta. You can eat them with soup. You can eat them stuffed into floppy shop-bought sandwiches at 2am, in a panicked attempt to sober up before you get home. Below are 10 of the best meatball recipes, but these are a drop in the ocean. If you know a better one, it is your duty to share it in the comments.
We should start with what can only be described as empirically good meatballs. When Felicity Cloake took the dish head-on in 2011, she concluded that you would be a fool to mess with simplicity. Hers is a classic meatball: a mixture of pork and beef, bulked out with milk-soaked bread and flavoured with fennel and parsley. It is impossible to go wrong with this.
