Ham Balls — The Dish That Needs No Occasion, Just the Table

The newspaper article came out. Front page of the Savannah Morning News weekend section, above the fold: "Dorothy Henderson: A Decade of Feeding Savannah, One Blog Post at a Time." There is a photo of me at the stove, with the cast iron skillet in my hand and Michael on my hip and Pearl in the bouncy seat in the background, and I am looking at the camera with the face of a woman who has been doing this for sixty-two years and knows exactly who she is. The photo is the truest thing I've ever seen of myself. I look like a cook. I look like a grandmother. I look like the Lowcountry.

Jasmine Williams wrote beautifully. She wrote about the history — the Gullah-Geechee traditions, the food that survived the Middle Passage, the greens that sustained generations. She wrote about the blog — ten years, five hundred weeks, every post ending with "Now go on and feed somebody." She wrote about the family — Earl, Michael, Kayla, the babies. She wrote about the skillet. She quoted me: "This skillet has been in my family for ninety-one years. It has never seen soap. It has cooked for weddings and funerals and Mondays. It doesn't care what the occasion is. It just cooks."

The phone has not stopped ringing. Church members. Former students. People I haven't heard from in years. A woman named Meredith from Connecticut who read the article online and wants the shrimp and grits recipe. A man from Chicago who says the article made him call his grandmother. Good. That is what the article should do — make people call their grandmothers, make people cook dinner, make people sit at the table and remember who they are.

Denise cut the article out and laminated it. It is on the refrigerator now, next to Angela Simmons's letters and the Amara tomato drawing and the wedding cake photo and Kayla's Mother's Day cards and the photo of Michael in the Chef Michael apron. The refrigerator museum has a new wing. The new wing is the front page of the Savannah Morning News. The museum is growing. The museum is me.

Made shrimp and grits tonight. Because that is what Dorothy Henderson does after being in the newspaper: she goes home and she cooks the dish that started everything, and the dish is the same, and the woman is the same, and the fame changes nothing because the food was never about the fame. The food was about the table. The table was about the family. The family was about the love. And the love doesn't read the newspaper.

Now go on and feed somebody.

Meredith from Connecticut asked for the shrimp and grits, and one day I’ll write that one up proper — but tonight, standing in the kitchen with the newspaper article still ringing in my ears and the skillet still warm on the stove, I found myself reaching for something older and simpler, the kind of dish my mother put on the table when the occasion was nothing more than Tuesday. These Ham Balls are not glamorous. They do not photograph for the front page. They are exactly the kind of food that has kept this family fed and together for as long as I can remember, and that’s recommendation enough for me.

Ham Balls

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 1 hr | Total Time: 1 hr 20 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground ham
• 1/2 lb ground pork
• 1 cup plain breadcrumbs
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• For the sauce:
• 1 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 teaspoon dry mustard

Instructions

1. Preheat. Heat your oven to 325°F. Lightly grease a 9x13-inch baking dish and set it aside.
2. Mix the meat. In a large bowl, combine the ground ham, ground pork, breadcrumbs, beaten eggs, milk, and black pepper. Mix with your hands until everything is just combined — don’t overwork it.
3. Form the balls. Roll the mixture into balls roughly 1 1/2 inches across — you should get about 24. Arrange them in a single layer in the prepared baking dish.
4. Make the sauce. In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine the brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, water, and dry mustard. Stir and cook just until the sugar dissolves, about 3–4 minutes. Pour the sauce evenly over the ham balls.
5. Bake. Place the dish in the oven and bake uncovered for 1 hour, spooning the sauce back over the ham balls once or twice as they cook, until they are deeply glazed and cooked through.
6. Rest and serve. Let the ham balls rest for 5 minutes before serving. Spoon plenty of the pan sauce over the top. Serve with mashed potatoes, buttered green beans, or whatever’s waiting on your stove.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 320 | Protein: 19g | Fat: 12g | Carbs: 34g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 780mg