“Masha, what do you want for lunch today?” My mom
asked every day when I got home from school at 3:15. Even though I ate the sub-par
cafeteria food for lunch every day and had a full stomach when I came home, a
smiled formed on my face and my eyes opened wide every day my mom asked me that
question.
My response would always be, “kotleti, please”.
Kotleti, simply put, are Russian meatballs. There
is no American dictionary definition for kotleti, but the dictionary definition
for meatballs is similar. Meatballs are defined by the Oxford English
Dictionary as “A small ball made mainly of minced or chopped meat, often served
with a sauce or as part of a soup or stew.”[1]
There are a few differences between American meatballs and Russian kotleti.
1.
American meatballs
are classically made of ground pork, whereas Russian kotleti are made of ground
chicken and turkey.
2.
American
meatballs are usually eaten with pasta or in a sauce or stew, but kotleti are
usually just eaten plain.
3.
American
meatballs are also often in the form of a spherical shape, whereas kotleti are
a more elongated cylindrical patty.
4.
American
meatballs often have little additions to the meat, unlike kotleti, which are
enriched heavily with garlic, onions, and sometimes other vegetables.
When I think about my early childhood, the one food
that always comes to my mind is kotleti. My grandma would make my sister and I
a batch of kotleti weekly. We looked forward to the weekend when she would
visit us, for her company and her delicious gift to us—the dozen or so kotleti—that
we would devour almost immediately. I could smell the aromatic-garlicy sent of kotleti
from a mile away, if my life depended on it.
My classmates and American friends would often be perplexed
when they came over to my house and when my mom would offer them “Russian
Meatballs”, they of course agreed, not knowing what they were getting into.
More often than not, they would try a piece, spit it out and say, “That’s not a
meatball! That’s just turkey with smelly garlic!” This may be factually true,
but to me, kotleti were the highlight of my afternoons after grade school and
continue to be one of the foods I crave the most on any given day.
Great post! (Also, good job on the citation.) I especially liked your usage of repetition for your lists, starting with "American meatballs" for each number. In this situation, the repetition works well.
ReplyDeleteGrade: Check