A meaty affair

Spices, and the way Indian food is flavoured, have influenced many cuisines. It is no wonder that India touches all who love to cook and eat good food, writes Mathias Pilblad

Mathias Pilblad

Classic meatballs

North African-style lamb balls. PHOTOS COURTESY Meatballs for the People: Recipes from the cult Stockholm Restaurant

In Sweden, we have probably eaten meatballs as long as we have been able to cook over an open fire. Historically, a Swedish meatball is a mixture of some proper meat, onions, eggs and potatoes or bread, salt and perhaps either allspice or white pepper — two spices that came to Sweden fairly early and are used in almost all Swedish kitchens today (my favourite is allspice). Unfortunately, none of the lovely and flavourful spices that exist around the world, especially India, grows naturally in Sweden, so the addition of such a range of spices is relatively new to our meatballs.

We have long lived with the story that one of Sweden’s most powerful kings, Charles XII, in the early 18th century brought the meatball home from the Ottoman Empire, today the Middle East, where he lived for five years, a great story, but no one knows if it’s true. There are said to have been recipes for meatballs from The Forme of Cury, an English cookbook, served in the English court during King Richard II’s epic feasts in the late 14th century. However, the first time that a recipe for meatballs is mentioned in a Swedish cookbook is in 1755 by Cajsa Warg, who wrote books on how to cook and care for a home, a book that was published in 14 editions in several of Sweden’s neighbouring countries, the last time more than 50 years after his death. In Sweden, the meatball has a natural place on the kitchen table every day of the week, we eat it for lunch or dinner, partly just as everyday life, and partly because most Swedes have some beautiful memory from their mother or perhaps grandmother who cooked the best meatballs. We have listened to stories of meatballs, and everyone of course has different opinions about which is the best meatball. The humble meatball is part of our culture!

Meatballs around the world

Meatballs, albondigas, polpette, lion’s head, keftedes — you find meatballs around the world, like a dear child with many names. I love to travel and have been lucky enough to visit many countries around the world. Eating the local food is as obvious to me as trying to learn a few phrases in the local language; meeting new people around a dinner table must be one of the best things I know, and is always an easy conversation. Everyone likes something about food, everyone has an opinion,
and nothing is more right or wrong; talking about food over a dinner table invites you to long and interesting conversations, even if the language is not always with me. And as soon as I see something resembling a meatball on a menu, I always try it. The grilled meatballs on skewers, made from crab from the street stalls in Bangkok are always great. In Thailand, the meatballs are a little more compact than they are at home, but they are much spicier, which I love. And the chicken meatballs in Seoul are enough to get you teary-eyed. They’re perfect for soups and Ramens (trendy and delicious).

To sit in a tavern in Manhattan, in Little Italy, and eat big polpette in rich tomato sauce, is to feel the pride and love that went into it, from the kitchen all the way to your table. The Italian meatball in NYC is not the same as in Italy, in their eagerness to be Italian I think they exaggerate all tastes, which makes them amazing, and sometimes so big that you only eat one, filled with mozzarella and swimming in tomato sauce.

When I ate at a small restaurant in Chile de Santiago, at 2 am, I got a warm glow to see their meatballs on the menu. However, here my memory fails me a little; it was a happy evening that had turned into a night out with a newfound friend, who is also a great private chef. Sydney, a city on the other side of the world from Stockholm, seems to have adopted something like the European meatball (I don’t know if it’s the influence of early European settlers or just that there are plenty of Swedes there) but mixed it with their local cuisine and Asian flavours to create something special. When I was a tourist there we ate alligator meatballs — the chicken of the sea!

Keftedes is the Greek meatballs I always eat when I am on holiday in the Mediterranean. The Greeks know their meatballs, often flavoured with mint, the favourite is when they come with feta cheese in the middle. From Northern Africa you can experience amazing flavours of meatballs, often baked in a traditional tagine. My favourite would be one flavoured with ras el hanout — a spice with lots of flavour.

India, a country that loves
to cook & eat

As a young chef in Stockholm, I trained in traditional French cuisine, but as the years passed, I began to use more and more spices. After a couple of trips to London, in the late 90s, where I visited trendy and ‘real Indian restaurants,’ I began to understand that Indian cuisine has so much to teach French and European cuisine. One of my greatest ‘aha’ experiences is a dish made from red lentils, carrots and onions, with secret spices. It had simple ingredients but highlighted the noble art of cooking with spices; I never got the recipe, but remember amazing cumin and cinnamon. My great respect for Indian cuisine lies in how adept you are at using spices. It is a genuine craft. I am always impressed by how spices can elevate a simple vegetarian dish, something that is becoming more popular among many of us today as we seek to look for some meat-free alternatives. Today we are very lucky that we have several really good Indian restaurants in Stockholm, where we get to experience the great variety of Indian food culture. A lot is about spices, and now we have also got more of street food scene; full of fun and magical food. I think spices and the way Indian food is flavoured have influenced many cuisines without us really understanding. I’ve eaten amazing Cape Malay curry in Cape Town, a potato curry at a small lodge at Mount Kinabalu, Borneo, chai with green cardamom at a crazy jungle party in Bali, and, somewhere between Nairobi and Mombasa, a hotpot of goat, with a lot of spices. Without spices, the world would be a boring place Thank you India for the amazing food culture the rest of the world gets to taste!

(The writer has just published Meatballs for the People: Recipes from the cult Stockholm Restaurant published by Bloomsbury.)