Meatball
dish made from ground meat rolled into a small ball-like form
A meatball is ground meat (mince) rolled into a large somewhat spherical ball, sometimes along with other ingredients, such as bread crumbs, minced onion, eggs, butter, and seasoning. Meatballs are cooked by frying, baking, steaming, or braising in sauce. There are many types of meatballs made with different meats and spices. The term is sometimes extended to meatless versions based on legumes, vegetables, mushrooms, fish (also commonly known as fish balls) or other seafood.
History
The ancient Roman cookbook Apicius included many meatball-type recipes.
Early recipes included in some of the earliest known Arabic cookbooks generally feature seasoned lamb rolled into orange-sized balls and glazed with egg yolk and sometimes saffron.
Poume d'oranges is a gilded meatball dish from the Middle Ages.
By region
Various recipes of meatballs can be found across Europe and Asia. From Iberia and Sweden to the Indian subcontinent, there is a large variety of meatballs in the kofta family.
Europe
Albanian fried meatballs (qofte të fërguara) include feta cheese.
“Meatball” enters the record as dish made from ground meat rolled into a small ball-like form. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Meatball, dish and made can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4831844. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Meatball” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.