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How I cook: Porcupine Balls
Sep. 27th, 2009 10:41 pmI regret to inform you that Porcupine Balls do not contain actual porcupines. Sorry.
What it does have is a quantity of rice and hamburger mixed together and shaped into meatballs which are then cooked in a tomatoish sauce (more on that later) so that the rice pokes out like porcupine quills. Seeing this requires a certain amount of imagination, but your reward is being able to eat something called "porcupine balls" which is, as any seven-year-old could tell you, highly entertaining.
It's also very, very good. It was one of my favorite dishes when I was a child, but until today I had never made it for myself. I have a recipe card in my box with my mom's recipe, written out in her beautiful old-fashioned cursive handwriting, and over the years when sorting through the box I have pulled out the recipe, thought 'oh, that sounds so good', and put the recipe back.
The problem was the rice. My mom always made it with Minute Rice, a product I abandoned without a backward glance over 20 years ago after discovering the real thing. I wasn't going to buy Minute Rice just for one recipe, and I didn't think that the recipe would work with real rice.
Enter the Internet. Or more exactly, Google. I was lying around my apartment on Friday (sick at home due to sinuses, *sigh*) when it occurred to me that someone else might have figured out how to make it with real rice, and if so they might have posted the discovery online. To my surprise, it turns out that Porcupine Meatballs (its more formal name) is a very old recipe (one source credits it to the 1901 Settlement House Cookbook), and it was originally made with real rice. Well, knock me over with a minced onion. I put a pound of hamburger in the fridge to thaw out and went off rejoicing.
The lesser issue with the recipe is that Mom used condensed tomato soup in the cooking liquid. This is something I never have in the house because 1) I am not a soup-eater and 2) commercial canned soups have heart-stopping amounts of sodium in them. I used a can of tomato sauce mixed with water and it worked great. I had come up with a number of ideas on how to thicken the sauce, but in the event it wasn't necessary--I'm guessing that the cooking rice gave off enough starches to give it the sauce some body.
So, I made them for dinner tonight and they were just as yummy as I remembered them so I think I'll be having them on a regular basis. One of the versions I found via google used allspice in the meatball mixture, and I mean to try that someday. But I don't think they need a lot of seasoning; their glory lies in the potent combination of beef and tomato. Sometimes simple is the best way to go.
( Another addition to my electronic recipe box )
What it does have is a quantity of rice and hamburger mixed together and shaped into meatballs which are then cooked in a tomatoish sauce (more on that later) so that the rice pokes out like porcupine quills. Seeing this requires a certain amount of imagination, but your reward is being able to eat something called "porcupine balls" which is, as any seven-year-old could tell you, highly entertaining.
It's also very, very good. It was one of my favorite dishes when I was a child, but until today I had never made it for myself. I have a recipe card in my box with my mom's recipe, written out in her beautiful old-fashioned cursive handwriting, and over the years when sorting through the box I have pulled out the recipe, thought 'oh, that sounds so good', and put the recipe back.
The problem was the rice. My mom always made it with Minute Rice, a product I abandoned without a backward glance over 20 years ago after discovering the real thing. I wasn't going to buy Minute Rice just for one recipe, and I didn't think that the recipe would work with real rice.
Enter the Internet. Or more exactly, Google. I was lying around my apartment on Friday (sick at home due to sinuses, *sigh*) when it occurred to me that someone else might have figured out how to make it with real rice, and if so they might have posted the discovery online. To my surprise, it turns out that Porcupine Meatballs (its more formal name) is a very old recipe (one source credits it to the 1901 Settlement House Cookbook), and it was originally made with real rice. Well, knock me over with a minced onion. I put a pound of hamburger in the fridge to thaw out and went off rejoicing.
The lesser issue with the recipe is that Mom used condensed tomato soup in the cooking liquid. This is something I never have in the house because 1) I am not a soup-eater and 2) commercial canned soups have heart-stopping amounts of sodium in them. I used a can of tomato sauce mixed with water and it worked great. I had come up with a number of ideas on how to thicken the sauce, but in the event it wasn't necessary--I'm guessing that the cooking rice gave off enough starches to give it the sauce some body.
So, I made them for dinner tonight and they were just as yummy as I remembered them so I think I'll be having them on a regular basis. One of the versions I found via google used allspice in the meatball mixture, and I mean to try that someday. But I don't think they need a lot of seasoning; their glory lies in the potent combination of beef and tomato. Sometimes simple is the best way to go.
( Another addition to my electronic recipe box )
