“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 offered 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.
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