“More Power To Ya” Mayberry Meatballs

If you’re looking for health food, please go away. The latest #MeatballMonday features a saucy barbecue-flavor meatball from the 1991 Aunt Bee’s Mayberry Cookbook. You could borrow it from the Internet Archive until a bunch of publishers decided nobody should be allowed to read out-of-print books electronically. I have a Kindle version of this book that I bought ten years ago for 99 cents after the Mayberry in the Midwest Festival, which has also been cancelled. Most of the recipes feature ingredients that are not available here, but I thought I could swing this one.

The sauce has a commercial BBQ sauce base, refined with ketchup, tomato paste, and brown sugar. My bottle of “American BBQ sauce” from a Discounter‘s Fake American Food Week was closer in texture to grape jelly than to sauce, so I substituted tomato sauce for the tomato paste and added extra water. The sauce simmered on the stovetop while the meatballs are prepared.

The second ingredient of this recipe: “20 Ritz crackers, crushed.” The supermarket where I have purchased Ritz crackers in a sturdy cardboard box on and off for eight years, most recently in February 2024, had nothing. Not even a bare spot on the shelf. The supermarket is having a fight with the supplier. Again. The world grows grimmer every day.

The German knock-off crackers–a brand name product, the style is the knock-off– are sold in plastic bags, for your pre-crushed convenience.

I like to think I am smarter than I look, so I weighed the lonesome intact cracker, found it was 3g, and decided 61g of crumbles was close enough to “20 crackers.” (These are not Lillian’s meatballs.)

Then I crushed them down further. The finer the crumb, the finer the meatballs. (I just made that up.)

Because I am an umami junkie, I added some parsley and doubled the black pepper. I also grated the onion, which was a new experience for me.

The balls are baked for half an hour, while the sauce simmers. The meatball mass wasn’t very wet, and with the fat dripping off the rack, I thought they might be dry. I used my broiler trick to get a little tasty crust on the tops.

The recipe says to add the balls to your simmering sauce, and let them go for “several hours”. Not happening here, with the highest electricity prices in Europe! I let them simmer while I prepared the mashed potatoes. It was enough.

The sauce is–as expected–extremely sweet and a bit one-dimensional. Next time I will skip the brown sugar, and add some chili powder instead. The balls have a fine inner consistency, and despite the lack of liquid to soften up the cracker crumbs, were quite moist.

Eatin’ speaks louder than words. Cue up The Darlings and tuck in.