Grandma mary's chicken fricassee with meatballs

Cutlets and meatballs

This is a lost-and-found recipe -- one I never got from my grandmother but have recreated over time. Though it was always called chicken fricassee, it's not about the chicken, but the meatballs. <br />It may be a simple, heimish dish, but it exemplifies the essence of Jewish cooking. The thinking is not dissimilar to nose-to-tail cooking or cooking-with-scraps: not just to make dishes with tam (flavor; sort of the Yiddish equivalent of umami), but to make good use of everything. For instance, the recipe uses chicken parts: my grandmother would have used necks, backs, and feet, with maybe a few wings thrown in (I use all wings for convenience), as well as chicken fat she'd saved and rendered. She would have served this with mashed potatoes made not with dairy but with chicken fat and egg, but it wouldn't hurt to have some challah on hand for dunking.