Swedish Meatballs
I’m normally not a bad cook. I rather like cooking and take great pleasure in accomplishing a good meal. Tonight was not my night though, despite the utter simplicity of the meal at hand. I managed to not boil the potatoes, underboil the rice, burn my hand on scalding water and overload the entire thing with green olives (which must be handled with far more care than the black).
A thought did strike my mind though, during all of this.
A meatball is a generally mass of ground meat that is typically rolled meat comprised of rolled ground beef and other ingredients, such as bread or breadcrumbs, minced onion, various spices, and possibly eggs, cooked by frying, baking, steaming, or braising in sauce.
So far removed from more simple culinary tactics as grilled lamb or the like, we actually need:
- Meat, or something functionally similar (vegitarian meatballs exist, frequently consisting of pecan meal or cracker crumbs)
- A method of mincing the meat
- Eggs, or something that has a light adhesive structure
- Spices
- A method of frying them.
This gives us a bar: We need the ability to hunt (to gather meat and collect eggs), smelt/sinter metals (to make a heatable surface for frying), an understanding of spices, an understanding of animal anatomy, and - the key ingredient - the ability to make sharp knives with which to mince the meat.
Other options with meat would be Chinese style meatballs such as Lion’s heads or your run-of-the mill dim sum, or perhaps the English style faggots, which require less precise mincing and simply more adhesive (soy or meat fat). One could also go as far as to accept broiled meat in sacks such as haggis, but that would be pushing it.
Using a vegetarian recipe lowers the bar somewhat:
1 c. cracker crumbs
1/2 c. cottage cheese
1/2 c. ground nuts
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 onion, diced & sauteed
Sm. amt. garlic salt
1 can cream of mushroom soup thinned with 1 can water
Sm. amt. vegetable fat
Crackers are essentially a sweet bread. Baking of bread dates back to the neolithic era, which is contemporary with development of elementary metalworking techniques in Europe, although in the Americas and Oceania societies did not develop metalworking despite achieving vaguely post-neolithic technology. So given the pan to fry it on, bread can also be a given.
Vegetable fat can be collected by pounding vegetables between stones. Given the technology of pottery, this can also be collected. Cream of mushroom soup is harder to acquire, but this is probably used in this recipe for its adhesive quality first and foremost, and therefore you can easily substitute for eggs (which are also included), which, to a neolithic person, is easier to acquire. I suggest adding more spices to compensate for the lack of the mushroom flavor though.
Cheese is difficult, although its origins predate known history - possibly cheese and bread were developed simultaneously, necessitating cheese sandwiches. I dream! But not all meatballs contain cheese. Albanian meatballs, Qofte të fërguara, contain feta cheese. You can also add milk (as the Finnish do) for a similar texture. It’s also fairly likely that the early cheeses were hard curd cheeses, somewhat like Parmesan or an old Edam in texture and flavor - fairly hard to use for baking without proper instruments for fine-grained carving of the cheese, which would also make mincing meat a possibility.
I think it’s safe to assume that, contrary to what G’Kar claimed, sentience is not the only prerequisite for having Swedish Meatballs (or Breen!)… neolithic-level technology and potentially metalworking will suffice, but that’s a whole host of technologies, none of which are given.
An obverse question here is: Can a civilization develop manned space flight without having invented meatballs?
