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that meatballs - polpette - are made with both cooked and raw meat in Italy?
The division is regional up to a point. The tendency is for polpette to be made with fresh meat when the meat is too tough to enjoy unless it is ground, and this tends to happen more in the south, where the animals where used for work which toughened up their flesh. Where the meat is good enough to grill and roast without grinding, cooked meat polpette make their appearance as a way of using up leftover roasts.
Sicily has many raw meat polpette and polpettoni (meatloaves), some with exquisite dried fruit and nut elements, which are poached, fried, or grilled. Sicily also has many other polpette made with non-meat ingredients: eggplants, rice, or fish with pine nuts and raisins to name just a few. Naples again makes polpette from uncooked meat, and more often than not these are served in tomato sauce.
In Rome we come across the first polpette made from ground cooked meats, often breadcrumbed and fried, and sometimes subsequently served in sauce. Tuscany has many a cooked meat polpette recipe, again often breadcrumbed and fried, as well as recipes for using up left over roasts containing the word rifatto, which loosely translates as "re-cooked", for both meats and vegetables. Liguria, tough mountainous terrain like much of the south, makes raw meat polpette and vegetarian polpettone.
Confusingly Milan uses the Spanish derived term (from Arabic originally) mondeghili (albondiga) for its cooked meat meatballs, and the word polpette for meat rolls normally called involtini in Northern Italy. Venice has both cooked and raw meat polpette, as well as meatless polpette made either of spinach, pine nuts and raisinsor of salt cod, these last two an influence of the Jewish cuisine of the Middle East.
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