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Meatballs are one of my daughter’s most favorite foods on the face of the earth.  Add a little spaghetti with sauce and she is in heaven.  This meatball recipe is fairly standard, ground beef, onion, bread crumbs, an egg….pretty regular recipe until we hit two ingredients that aren’t in any meatball recipe I’ve ever made….cream and bacon.  Bacon in a meatball is such an awesome idea!

To make these meatballs, I first chopped up my bacon slices into small pieces and fried them until they were crisp.  I chopped them again after they were fried.  Cooked bacon is much easier to cut into small pieces.  I mixed everything together and formed the mixture into meatballs.  A tip to get meatballs all the same size is to use a large cookie scoop to portion them before rolling them into meatballs.

I like to cook meatballs in the oven instead of on on the stove.  You can fit them all at once and no babysitting required (I also like to cook my bacon in the oven too!).  I cooked my meatballs at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.  Your cook time will vary depending on the size of your meatballs.

This meatball recipe made 20 meatballs.  You may get more or less depending on how large or small you make them.  The cost of the ingredients came to $5.84, making each serving 97 cents.

Original Recipe

Meat Balls.

Take one slice salt pork about an inch and half thick, cut it up in squares and fry until crisp.  One pound of round steak, the fried squares of pork, half of a medium onion, put through meat chopper first, then the meat twice through.  Salt and pepper to taste grate a half cupful of dry bread, or toast is still better, one egg well beaten, a good half cup rich milk or cream, work these ingredients well together like you would a cake, form into either round or oblong shapes, and fry in grease from the pork.  A little piece of butter may be added.

Mrs. A. J. Swenson

Printed in the Chicago Tribune on November 14, 1909