This post was originally published on Substack
Having caught up on all the available episodes of The Great British Bake Off, I started watching Nadiya Bakes this week. (GBBO winner Nadiya Hussain is an absolute treasure—Nadiya’s Time To Eat also premiered on Netflix around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and her television presence is a soothing cup of chamomile tea.)
Midway through the first episode, she offers her recipe for seekh kebab toad-in-the-hole and notes that she’ll be making it “desi style,” filled with additional aromatics. The camera peers into her mixing bowl, where she’s adding handfuls of chopped onion and coriander into the mix of ground beef. The contrast of bright green against the pinkish-red of raw meat fires off a well-traveled synapse in my brain: that’s just like albóndigas!
During my childhood summers, mi abuelita would fly from Fresno, California to my hometown in the Chicagoland suburbs to care for me while I was on break from school.
As the story—now family legend—goes, there was a summer where mi abuelita made a pot of albóndigas (a Mexican meatball soup with carrots and potatoes) and I was absolutely smitten. I could not get enough of this dish. I asked for sky-high numbers of these lemon-sized meatballs to be ladled into my bowl (“Seis!”) and mi abuelita was in awe of how I left my plate clean.
Mi abuelita is a woman who loves hard, and with my declarations of albóndigas being my favorite food ever, it was like she’d struck oil. Now she had this direct avenue through which she could express her love for her youngest granddaughter, concentrated into hand-rolled beef spheres laced with rice and mint.
The reason this event became legend is because that summer became the summer of demasiadas albóndigas. I don’t remember it exactly, but I know somehow that it happened, and it still gets recounted with a laugh by my mom: when mi abuelita realized how much I loved albóndigas, she kept making them. And making them. And making them. Dinners for the family were always changing, but lunch for Jasmine was almost always albóndigas. And soon, that summer’s plates of albóndigas caught up and surpassed my childhood gluttony, and I didn’t have the heart to tell mi abuelita that the dish I had fallen so hard for, I was now tired of.
My mom figured it out eventually, and she passed the message along to her mom, and the apologies rained down: “¡Mija, me hubieras dicho!”
For a good long while, albóndigas stayed out of the kitchen. When they did return, it was (and is still, years and years later) always accompanied with someone remembering the summer when mi abuelita out-albóndiga’d me.
As I write this, what my mind keeps circling back to (when it isn’t consumed by the now-intense antojo for albóndigas) is that today is March 3rd, 2021.
We have been in this COVID-19 pandemic for about a year.
The United States has always been a nation fraught with division, and this past year took all of that and put it in a pressure cooker (and not even the fun kind where you get caldo de rez at the end). White supremacy has stepped out of the shadows, and it’s banking on the rest of us to turn on each other, to stand fragmented and unable to fight back. We can’t even face a deadly virus as a united front—that’s how dire the situation’s become.
Wow, Jasmine, this took a turn. I thought we were talking about meatballs here.1
I know, but bear with me.
I don’t understand that drive towards hate. Theoretically, objectively, politically, yes, but from a deeply human perspective—no. It just doesn’t make sense. And I would venture to say that—beyond my own basic empathy and decency—my philosophy of honoring and loving the sheer humanity in others has often been crystallized by things as small and simple as a meatball.
A meatball.
I mean, have you eaten a good meatball? A really, really good meatball?2
Isn’t there something magical about it?
Maybe it’s something about how they’re all shaped by hand, one by one, like you can’t help but infuse it with love.
And we all have that. Every corner of the Earth has some version of a meatball. (Don’t cite me on this; I’m a storyteller, not a statistician.) When I was going through my previous article and adding hyperlinks to the names of dishes I was mentioning, I found a standalone Wikipedia article for each one of them. Albóndigas, however, redirects to the Wikipedia page for meatball because there are so many kinds of meatballs.3
Across cultures, we can partake in a dish that reminds us of our own, and we can have that connection with the person on the other side. I know I have memories associated with my dish, which means they have memories associated with theirs, too. A shared, human thing. How can there be any other sentiment that comes from that but joy?
“When I serve this up for dinner,” Nadiya says, towards the end of her seekh kebab segment, “I can’t help but smile on the inside ’cause I know how happy it makes my kids. It’s heartwarming.”
The albóndiga is a symbol of my grandmother’s love for me.
We’re all the same.
Si ustedes prestan atención y analizan bien
Se darán cuenta que todos somos parecidos […]
Y la ciudad de New Orleans
Se parece a Barranquilla
—“Décimas” by Carlos Vives
1 In an earlier version of this article, the history major in me wanted to go down a rabbit hole on the history of albóndigas, but it just didn’t seem to fit. As you can see, it was the political science major in me that had more to say anyway. But if you’re interested, here’s what I had started to write (rough and unedited):
Understanding the history of sopa de albóndigas feels like pulling on an errant yarn on a wool sweater. My strongest memories of albóndigas come from mi abuelita. Mi abuelita viene de México, y ella habla español. We speak Spanish and eat beef and rice on this continent because of colonization. The Spanish word albóndiga comes from the Arabic al-bunduqa. The presence of Arabic in the Spanish language (albóndiga, azúcar, arroz, to name a few) comes from Al-Andalus, when the Umayyad ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula and the culture of former Hispania became infused with all of the good stuff (al-bunduqa, sukkar, arruz).
All this to say that, somewhere out there, in 2021, perhaps there is someone with a memory like mine in which they ate one too many kofta, and we are functionally talking about the same thing.
2 Seriously, have you? Please tell me about it. I love a good meatball story.
3 The only exception is kofta, which has been flagged as an article that should probably be merged into the main meatball article on Wikipedia. Stay strong, kofta, my distant meatball cousin! I believe in you!