Umatha’s Kheema Meatballs & Soup

This is a recipe from one of the husband’s very favorite aunts–at whose table and through whose care over the years came not just food but nourishment. Abundances of each, large welcomings and life-long embraces. First grandchild that the husband was, he had many mothers who doted on him and took him as their own. So, when we married in 1995, among the first instructions given to me as a new daughter-in-law was to “Write those recipes down!”–I think not so much because they were inherently special, which they are, but because they held so much that could not ever be satisfactorily, wholly, finally said. Food can be large like that, much larger than words. Like the hot oils of a good tempering, the best carriers of flavor and feeling.

I’ve learned a great deal from the husband’s favorite aunts–directly and obliquely, their presence in my life and in the husband’s affective memory has made me the cook I am. This post about meatballs is one story of just how.

Most folks who chance on this page and my social media profile make one fundamental assumption about me: that I’m vegan, a plant-based eater, or at the very least vegetarian. When they find a chicken soup recipe tucked in here, the response has at times been shock, withdrawal, and sometimes a spit of spite: your happiness depends on killing animals? It’s time to put this matter to bed–though I realize it’s like getting the kids down for as long as they were kids, necessary to do so night after night.

I grew up vegetarian, and in a family that cultivated a strong moral distaste for any other sort of eating. Travel abroad was fraught with anxiety and obsessive label-reading. My more enduring memories of visiting the great monuments of Europe with my parents are interspersed with remembrances of finding meats in prepared foods innocuously labelled “spinach” and going without dinner because it was too late to go out to find anything else. When a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Kano once got routed to Libreville in Gabon because of the Harmattan dust storms that often clouded arial vision in northern Nigeria, we were served fish–because that’s not meat, right?–and were forced to make do with dinner rolls and butter.

I inherited a great many invaluable things from my parents, but these distastes and these anxieties were not prime among them. Then, love opened other doors, shall I say? Chapter Two of growing up was after marriage, when I came into other tales of village life and legendary cooks whose treasured recipes I’ve started documenting here under the “Balareddipalle” tag. And much of that involves meat. Not much caring for the physical sensations that fear brings on, not being fundamentally convinced of the logic of moral restriction or some notion of concocted traditionalism [I mean, there’s no meat-eating proscription in Hinduism, so it cannot be called good or bad by that logic alone]–I was relieved just to be able now to allow myself some curious exploration.

These meatballs are a marker on that journey. I recorded this and a handful of other recipes dutifully from Umatha (and other aunts) in the summer of 1995, and over the years became one of those cooks who would prepare the meat but eat very little of it herself. Being willing to work with all manner of different ingredients opens out worlds, endeared me to the affinal half of my family or at least didn’t set me apart from them–and while that process is of immense importance to me, the eating itself is optional, I’ve found. My own hunger gets satiated at many other points and in many other ways, not just at the dinner table. I remain, for better or worse, vegetarian at heart. Or, in the philosophical spirit of negation so unique to Indic traditions: not vegetarian, not vegan but also not non-vegetarian.

Eating is not what defines me. It is not a political act. Being curious and exploratory and unafraid and open, to people as much as to ingredients–why, that just makes me happy. I think it makes me a decent ethnographer, too.

The recipe recorded here is in fact a simple, nourishing, and very delicious preparation that leaves you with both hearty and versatile [and easily freezable] meatballs and a broth that can be had on its own or used as the base for other soups. A rasam by any other name? Those recovering from bad encounters with COVID-19 were often fed bone broths, which proved to be very restorative–this isn’t one, but it comes close.

We have as a family departed from heavier meat-eating village traditions considerably by simply not consuming much of it at all, but when we found so many butcheries in the Marché de Talensac in Nantes, so close to home, the weather so rainy and cold, each one of us a bit feverish with a kitch-kitch in the throat, I could only think of these meatballs and their light but deeply flavored broth. Eat the world in which you find yourself, they say. So, we did.

Having a kitchen that was not as extensively equipped as our own Indian one was no bar to producing this very Indian recipe, though we did have to leave out the grated coconut–and that I’d not always recommend doing, as the coconut is a bit of a game-changer.

Of course the butcheries at the Marché were quite beef-centered, and if we wanted ground lamb in a place where most folks only ground beef, the nice men said, we’d have to come back just at 1pm when the place would be shutting down and then they’d not mind clearing the machine to grind for us. So we ran over one day and got our half kilo agneau haché and ran back home to get lunch together pronto.

The process is incredibly simple, if a little time-consuming–but only to roll out the meatballs.

Step 1: Assemble ingredients

Step 2: Mix and roll out the balls

Step 3: Boil until the water is halved.

Step 4: Eat

You can fry the meatballs a little if you want, you can conjure a tomato sauce in which to dunk them, you can store some broth for later use–or all those or none of them. All that’s left to do at this stage, is to eat.