It's a farce!

Meatballs. I made a batch last weekend for the first time in years, riffing on The New York Times’ basic template:

• 1 lb ground meat

• ½ cup breadcrumbs

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 egg

To this, I added minced parsley, minced yellow onion, oregano, coriander, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and a bit of MSG. Seared them off in a cast-iron pan, added a jar of marinara, and kept the pan at simmer temp while cooking off pasta. Delightful.

These kinds of recipes are a gift — component parts to do with what you will, the exact necessity of each made clear, inviting experimentation and application of your own taste.

Meatballs are a farce. Meat dumplings and sausages, too.

Farce, as it turns out, is a French word brought into English in the 1300s. It’s a synonym for “forcemeat,” meaning “finely chopped and highly seasoned meat or fish that is served alone or used as a stuffing.” Wonderful stuff.

Go back hundreds of years further — the French word comes from the Latin verb facire, meaning “to stuff,” such as through a grinder, such as into lamb casings. Farce is seasoned mincemeat; it’s raw, seasoned sausage, later to be cooked. Crucially, forcemeat always has a fat component to bind it all together. It’s never pure lean.

The last bit of history that interests us today is this: unwashed playhouse types on both sides of the English Channel were using the word farce in much the same way we use it now, even as it entered the English language.

A farce, in my 21st-century mind, is a sham trial, a governing body, a band of backroom traders; the actions of a group bonded by greed, corruption, or general ineptitude; absolute power corrupts absolutely, but a whisper of the stuff’ll do just fine.

A farce is just ground meat dressed up, and most grocery-store ground meat is composed of cuts deemed unsellable or bits trimmed off the sellable cuts to render them more desirable under the butcher counter’s UV lights.

When I hear someone call something a farce — some unpopular Senate ruling, perhaps, or a neighborly dispute involving exactitudes of fence placement — I like to picture all parties involved as sausages.

Your least favorite senator — pick a party, pick a state; this recipe is simply a canvas for your own tastes — a mass of roughly ground meat stuffed in a lamb casing, the fingers thick sausages with the ends left untied, chunks of beef (or pork, you can use any meat) sloughing out.

Corrupt figures stuffed with processed offcuts. Grisly, pathetic scarecrows.

Any farce can be fixed by your own desires. Choose your own seasonings. Don’t forget breadcrumbs to keep it light (panko is great). Egg to bind. You read Lunch, so I know there’s no way you’ll forget the salt.

Season to taste.