My Meatball Recipe Comes From a Former Mob Boss

I found my meatball recipe the way all respectable home cooks do.

From a former mob boss.

I was looking online for authentic Italian recipes when Michael Franzese popped up in my feed. Franzese is a former caporegime in New York’s Colombo crime family, and the recipe he was sharing was his grandmother’s—the meatballs she made for Christmas Eve.

My response was entirely reasonable.

Well, you can’t go wrong with a real Italian mobster’s family recipe.

So I made them.

A little context may be useful here.

George is Croatian, but when it comes to food, his heart appears to have pledged allegiance to Italy. He’ll occasionally eat Chinese or Mexican, but Italian food is his comfort zone.

He’s also incredibly picky about it.

This is a man who loves Italian food enough to eat it constantly but is perfectly willing to tell you when the sauce isn’t right, the meatballs aren’t right or whatever else has failed to satisfy standards established by a Croatian man from Western Pennsylvania.

So when I decided I wanted to make really good Italian food at home, I went looking for the real thing.

That’s how I ended up taking culinary instruction from a former mob boss on the internet.

I followed the meatball recipe exactly.

I still do.

There are recipes I tinker with almost immediately. A little more of this. Less of that. Something the recipe doesn’t call for because I think it needs it.

Not these.

If a recipe survived an Italian grandmother, Christmas Eve and the Colombo crime family before making its way into my kitchen, I see no reason to get cocky.

More importantly, George loves them.

They’ve become the meatballs I make with Sunday sauce and the ones he specifically asks for. Somewhere along the way, without my changing a single ingredient, someone else’s family recipe became part of the food of our house.

I think that’s one of my favorite things about recipes.

We call them my meatballs or my sauce or my lasagna, but so much of what we cook comes to us with a history already attached.

A grandmother taught a daughter. A friend scribbled something on an index card. Someone clipped a recipe from a magazine and changed it so many times nobody remembers what the original said. A dish gets made for birthdays or Sundays or Christmas Eve until the people eating it can recognize it before they even taste it.

Then someone else finds it.

Sometimes on an old recipe card.

Sometimes in a cookbook.

And sometimes because the algorithm introduces you to a former mob boss.

I could give you my adaptation of the recipe, except I don’t have one. I make Franzese’s grandmother’s meatballs exactly the way he shared them, so I’m not going to change a few words, call them mine and pretend I invented something.

If you want to make them, go to the original source video and let the man teach you how to make his grandmother’s meatballs. You can also download the recipe here.

I can, however, offer my household’s review.

George approves.

For Italian food, that’s saying something.