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were a perfect medium for incorporating bread crumbs, cooked rice, or mashed potato. In this way, meatballs are like that other classic forcemeat, gefilte fish. And like gefilte fish, meatballs could, if necessary, be made ahead of time and served cold on the Sabbath, when cooking was prohibited. So the meatball proved a special boon to Jewish cooks, who over time found that adding finely chopped vegetables to the meatballs not only further stretched the meat but also gave variety to a dish that might otherwise have become too familiar. In Turkey, the result was albondigas.

And that brings us to the name itself—it isn’t Turkish. Turkish meatballs (which can include chopped onions, but not the wide variety of cooked vegetables in albondigas) are called köfte, from the Persian verb meaning “to pound,” which is also the root of the Greek keftedes. The word albondigas probably comes from the Arabic al bundaq, meaning “round,” though it might be a corrupted form of albidaca, meaning “chopped meat.” As the British food historian John Cooper notes in his excellent Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food, the Arabs of the early medieval period, like the Jews shortly afterward, often used the toughest meat by chopping it and turning it into meatballs. Both the name and the practice, then, indicate that these meatballs originated in the Middle East and migrated west with the Moorish conquests, until they arrived in Spain, where they became known as albondigas.

Albóndigas were extremely popular with the Jewish community in Spain, so much so that during the trials of the Inquisition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the preparation of albondigas, like the Sabbath stew adafina, was presented by prosecutors as evidence of secret Jewish practice. Of course, only Jews who stayed in Spain and converted to Catholicism were ever put on trial. The vast majority had long since fled, bringing their recipes for albondigas with them wherever they went, including Turkey, where they were welcomed by the Sultan Beyazit II—and where, half a millennium after the Spanish exile, Jews still call their meatballs albondigas.

These recipes, so little changed by time, exist today as enduring reminders of the capacity of the poor to become, if momentarily, rich: to overcome the strictures of poverty and turn the rudest fare into something delicious. The meat, tenderized by chopping and grinding, reveals the struggle to craft pleasing sustenance from seemingly forbidding ingredients, while the vegetables are the response to an otherwise wearying routine. The very name albondigas expresses broad swaths of European history, from the Arab conquests of the West to the exile of the Spanish Jews in the wake of the Inquisition. The present-day use of the name, too, shows the efforts of the Jews of Turkey to maintain their historical connection, over long centuries, to the homeland they so fervently loved and from which they fled in terror. Seemingly among the lowliest of foods, these meatballs are among the most glorious.

Albondigas de Prasa kon Muez

(Leek Meatballs with Walnuts)

This recipe is adapted from the cookbook Sefarad Yemekleri. Today, the meat is either pulverized in a food processor or chopped by hand with a knife, which gives a rougher texture, and, rather than olive oil, for a long time the meatballs have been fried in sunflower oil. Some Turkish recipes for the same leek meatballs call for adding soaked white bread to the meat instead of potato. For Passover, the meatballs are dredged in matzo meal instead of flour.

2 pounds (900 grams) medium leeks

1 large potato (about 1 pound, or 450 grams)

¾ pound (340 grams) ground beef or lamb

3 tablespoons coarsely chopped walnuts

3 eggs

salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

oil for frying

flour for dredging

a lemon

Discard the dark green portion of the leeks, and carefully wash the white and pale green part to rid it of all grit. Cut into ½-inch pieces. Peel and quarter the potato.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the leeks and the potato, and cook until