The sweet mystery of a childhood meatball dish

WNYC News

It's the season of food filled gatherings with family and friends. WNYC's Community Partnerships Desk is asking New Yorkers to share the stories and memories behind their favorite family recipes. We talked to Jessica Sucher as part of a collaboration with the Queen's Memory Project. Sucher lives in Brooklyn.

The transcript of Jessica Sucher' story has been lightly edited for clarity

Jessica Sucher: I am 48 years old. I was born on Long Island, and I live in Brooklyn. My parents on both sides were born in Brooklyn and then moved to the suburbs when they were kids, so a kind of very traditional Jewish American Brooklyn to the suburbs kind of story. To me, family and cooking means a lot about tradition and the kinds of foods we only eat when we're all together.

My grandma's Swedish meatballs were always the thing that my cousins and I requested when we went over to my grandma's. She was the only one that made them. They were these kind of very tough little meatballs in this sauce that had raisins, and no one would ever eat the raisins, but they were sweet, and they were just mysterious. We didn't know what was in them. I do not know why they are called Swedish meatballs because they really are not like any other Swedish meatballs I've had. My grandma passed away, but it would be a good question as to why they are Swedish unless they were just sweet-ish and we all just misinterpreted the name, which I didn't think of until right now.

The story that makes me laugh is that when my cousin got married, she passed on the secret recipe to my cousin. It was like this big deal because now, you know, this recipe was getting out. We learned it had all this like weird stuff in it, like grape jelly, and like there was all this like strange things that I guess can go into sauces, we just didn't know about it, and then when I got married, my mom and sister did a recipe book for me where they asked all of, you know, friends and family, women and the friends in the family to put together recipes. And so they asked my grandma for the Swedish meatballs recipe. Apparently, she was like, "I'm not telling anyone that recipe. I gave it to one grandchild. That's it. I'm done." So I was like, that's great, this is like this family mystery. My cousin has the recipe if you really need it, but this is my grandma's thing. And my mom was so upset because she thought this was some sort of like, you know, it was going to cause this deep family rift, but it didn't. It was just like, I never make those meatballs, but I really kind of loved the story that my grandma was just like, "No, I'm not doing that."