Forcemeat Balls

The kitchen already smells of roasting chicken. The windows have fogged. Somewhere beneath the bird, the juices are catching in the tin, turning dark and sticky, and the thyme you scattered over the breast an hour ago has crisped to almost nothing. This is the point where you roll the forcemeat balls.

They're an old recipe, the kind your grandmother might have made without a recipe at all, just a handful of this and a scattering of that, mixed in a bowl and shaped between flour-dusted palms. Breadcrumbs, suet, lemon zest, herbs, an egg to hold it all together. Nothing clever. Nothing you can't find in the kitchen already. But when they come out of the oven, golden and fragrant, and you pile them around the chicken on the serving plate, they do something to a roast dinner that nothing else quite manages. They complete it.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: forcemeat balls, lemon, thyme, Sunday. The recipe hasn't changed because it was right the first time. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, but this one arrived at its conclusion early.

They're worth keeping alive. Not for nostalgia, not as a museum piece, but because they taste good and they make a roast better. That's reason enough.