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- Grandma Trisha’s Thanksgiving meatballs are the star of the meal, made with love and a few clever twists.
- Her secret ingredient—a packet of onion soup mix—adds deep flavor without extra chopping or prep work.
- Soaking Italian bread in milk makes her meatballs extra soft and fluffy, creating the perfect tender bite every time.
On Thanksgiving, we don’t look forward to the turkey. We look forward to meatballs.
Always served after appetizers, my family’s Thanksgiving pasta course usually consists of my uncle’s stuffed shells and my Grandma Trisha’s meatballs. My husband often finds he has to tap out early after eating a serving, while my cousin Gianna tends to center her entire holiday meal around the meatballs. I don’t blame her, either: They’re one of the best parts of the menu—albeit untraditional.
As it turns out, my grandmother’s meatball recipe is a bit untraditional too. When I told her I planned to cook through her entire recipe collection on Substack, she said: “You better call me first—I’ve changed a lot of stuff!” One of those things was her meatballs.
Her original recipe, preserved in a typewritten, vintage book bound in thick red paper, calls for all the usual suspects: a blend of ground beef, pork and veal; breadcrumbs; day-old Italian bread; eggs; parsley; Parmesan cheese; garlic. Onions, a hotly debated inclusion, are noticeably absent in her original recipe. But she told me that since first documenting her recipe nearly 40 years ago, she’s started adding a secret ingredient: onion soup mix. And she had a few other new tricks as well.
Why Onion Soup Mix
My grandmother’s meatballs are so tender, they are practically fluffy. Plus, they’re packed with flavor, distinct enough that most of my family could likely pick them out of a lineup. So I was certainly going to trust any adjustments she had made over her 87 years.
As she explains, the onion soup mix delivers a ton of flavor to her meatballs, thanks to its combination of dehydrated onions and onion powder. Plus, the texture stays consistent (you won’t find a big onion to chomp through in the middle of your meatball) and you don’t have to do any additional prep work, like chopping then sautéing the onions, as is done in some recipes. She simply adds a 2-ounce packet of Lipton onion soup mix to the 5 pounds of meat she uses in her recipe. (If you’re making a smaller amount of meatballs, you won’t need the whole packet.)
When I asked her what inspired her to first try adding the soup mix to her meatballs, she laughed. A recipe she had stumbled across in the local newspaper “quite awhile ago,” titled Jack’s Meatloaf Recipe, had inspired the change. Besides the soup mix, she’ll also use Worcestershire sauce or—if she doesn’t have it—even soy sauce in the recipe for more flavor. “Sometimes it would taste a little bland,” she explains. But the additions “gave a little kick to it.”
And that fluffy texture? It’s most likely thanks to her use of Italian bread. While her original recipe just calls for the bread to be broken up, today she soaks the six or so broken-up slices she uses in some milk to tenderize them, then adds the softened bread and milk into her meatball mixture. She started doing that so the bread was easier to incorporate into the meatballs—without it, mixing all the ingredients was an arm workout.
I appreciate that Grandma Trisha is not as fussy as some other nonnas when it comes to following an old family recipe. As I’m cooking through her originals, she usually encourages my adjustments and tweaks. For example, my grandmother’s meatball recipe yields about 60 meatballs, enough to feed a small army, and requires that they all be pan-fried before making their way into a sauce. My grandmother sees no issue with this, as she has a massive, restaurant-size frying pan that can fry all the meatballs in just a few batches. My frying pan at home holds only about 10 meatballs, so I started baking my meatballs on sheet pans instead. My adjustment, she said, was similar to how a friend of hers who worked at a bar would make bulk meatballs, so it “probably was just as good.”
In all honesty: nothing beats hers.
The Bottom Line
My Italian American grandmother is a meatball pro. After 87 years of making and eating meatballs, she’s found a few tweaks to ensure that her meatballs are always tender and flavor-packed. Her big secret? Adding a package of onion soup mix with the 5 pounds of meat, Parmesan cheese, garlic, breadcrumbs, and Italian bread. This not only makes the meatballs extra tasty but also saves on prep time and ensures the texture is consistent throughout her meatballs, which are some of the most tender I’ve ever tasted.
