I'll warn you up front: this column will include references to three of my Italian grandmothers. (Since Grandma Peg Leg was Irish/German, basically a sour old pill and a godawful cook into the bargain, she'll be mercifully excluded. Also, we're not convinced that she's really related to us since Pop-Pop looked nothing like those people and was able to remain sober for whole days at a time, a trick which consistently eluded his so-called family. But I digress.) Those of us lucky enough to have had at least one Italian grandmother are familiar with the bliss, the art that is the proper meatball. The rest of you have been tricked into thinking that a meatball is merely a spherical hamburger and frankly, nothing all that special. You are wrong, wrong, wrong! Worse, you've been cheated and lied to.

On the surface, a meatball is a pretty simple creature, right? Take some ground meat, roll it into a ball, cook it, call it a day. Not hardly. When I was a kid there was a fierce and ugly competition between the grandmothers over who made the better meatball. This battle was played out every Sunday, as we took turns shuttling from one house to the next. Sunday dinner is a big deal in Italian families, at least it used to be. We alternated Sundays between my Grandma Bartholetti's row home in South Philadelphia and my Grandma Blackhair's suburban Cape Cod in South Jersey. Back then, pasta was called macaroni, sauce was called gravy, and if you had any sense you said that whoever's house you were eating dinner at made the best version of both.

Grandma Blackhair had learned the cooking arts from her own mother, Grandma Whitehair, who was fresh off the boat, as they say. In spite of her traditional old-country roots though, Blackhair was a modern woman. She didn't mind a shortcut or two and scorned others who clung to the old ways in the face of perfectly good canned plum tomatoes and Progresso Bread Crumbs. "Why kill yourself?" she'd philosophize, cigarette dangling as she sautéed garlic and onions. "It's a new world. Some of these old greaseballs make me nuts the way they won't try anything new. They're like my father. Who do they think they are, Sophia Loren and Mussolini?" Grandma Blackhair had a colorful way with words, but she made a mean meatballs-and-gravy. Her meatballs combined ground beef, pork and veal. She used only Locatelli cheese, saying that Parmesan was for Americans. Add fresh chopped parsley, never dried, whole eggs and the aforementioned Progresso Bread Crumbs. She'd roll up her sleeves, take off her rings, and knead that mixture till she judged it right. Then she'd form the balls by hand, and fry them in Mazola Corn Oil - the only brand permitted in her kitchen. She said that store brands tasted "off" and as for olive oil, "Please, are we in "The Godfather" around here? Use Mazola." She'd drain the meatballs on paper towels, then drop them one by one into an enormous pot of gravy where they'd swim for hours. They were firm, juicy and could take a bite without crumbling. They were awesome, and she was proud of every last one. That's where the trouble started.

Grandma Bartholetti, on the other hand, didn't have the benefit of a mom who'd passed through Ellis Island on the way to the kitchen. Her mother had died young, leaving Grandma Barth to fend for herself in the kitchen. But she compensated by marrying a real honest-to-God paisano, much older than she, skinny as a rail, dressed all in black from hat to shoes, with a passion for betting on the ponies to boot. She learned to cook from him and his tastes were as authentic as he was. Her meatballs were formed of the same ground beef, pork and veal. She'd never be caught using dried parsley and she too rejected any cheese but freshly grated Romano. Where she differed from Blackhair, where the war began, was over the breadcrumbs. Barth insisted on day-old Italian bread soaked in milk and carefully squeezed. Breadcrumbs were for the lazy, for the amateur. She was old school all the way. She also fried in olive oil, a glass of Schlitz nearby, her myopic, snappish Airedale lolling on the floor at her feet. "Whoever heard of cooking a meatball in corn oil? Please, I don't even want to know about it." Her meatballs were fine-grained and velvety. They were awesome, and she was proud of every last one.

Grandma Bartholetti didn't think much of my mom's choice for a husband, i.e., my father. She referred to him as "him", and never spoke directly to him if it could be avoided. Grandma Blackhair, while she genuinely loved my mother, openly acknowledged that no woman could ever be good enough for her son, especially not one who could barely cook and spent most days with her head lost in a book. Add to this the fact that the two women met at the church the day of my parent's hastily arranged teen marriage and you've got a volatile situation. Although they were unfailingly polite when together, they waged a covert war over cooking and grandchildren. They used us kids as spies and messengers, bribing us with candies and loose change. The question was always the same: "Sweetheart, precious, dimple-face...Whose meatballs do you like better? I know it's mine, go ahead, you can say it. I won't tell (insert name here)." We learned early to lie, to evade, to dodge and duck; in short, to keep the peace. These Sunday dinner/mind control opportunities were interrupted only by holidays where the meatball aggression was upped to include skirmishes over homemade bracciole, manicotti, and pizzelles.

The tension between the families mounted and who knows what the final, bloody outcome might have been had my father ("him") not decided out of the blue that we needed to move to Wyoming immediately. Which we did, leaving Sunday dinners, loud quarrels over meatballs, grandparents and arguably, civilization as a whole, two thousand miles behind. Since there were only nineteen people in the entire state of Wyoming at that time, none of them Italian, it seemed a safe bet that our days of worrying over ground meat were at an end. They were, along with my parent's marriage - but that's a story for another day.

The Grandmothers - Blackhair and Bartholetti - lived out the remainder of their days as enemies. They died having not seen one another for a good eighteen years. Each never wavered in her utter scorn of the other, proof that they were nothing if not consistent. The saddest part of the whole sad tale is the loss of their amazing meatballs. For when Blackhair tried to teach me the secrets, I was deep into my Gothic feminist teenage rebellion years and assured her that since I would not be enslaved to any kitchen for any man, and furthermore that red meat was repulsive, I wouldn't be needing to know how to make a stupid meatball. Her response? "Oh really? You'll miss me when I'm dead and then who's here to teach you anything, Miss College Lips?" Boy, was she right - about everything. As for Grandma Bartholetti's recipe? She passed that on to my mother who keeps making vague promises about sharing it with me one of these days, but hasn't yet, for no good reason that I can think of, other than her desire to keep me down. Paranoid? You try growing up in a family like this and see how you turn out.