Easy, Old-Fashioned Porcupine Meatballs

Have you heard of porcupine meatballs? They’re an old-school dish that are ready for a comeback. (You heard it here first!) Despite their rather funny name, porcupine meatballs are just beef meatballs made with white rice that get slowly cooked in a simple tomato sauce. The resulting meatballs are tender, flavorful, and perfect for serving on top of mashed potatoes, noodles, or honestly, more rice. They’re comforting and filling, and make the perfect weeknight dinner.

Porcupine meatballs came about during the Great Depression era as a way to help stretch ground beef into more meals. Adding rice bulked up the beef, yielding more meatballs for less money. The recipe stuck, and eventually people started making rice-filled meatballs by choice rather than necessity.

Part of what makes this recipe so easy is that you don’t even have to cook the rice before you add it to the meatball mixture. The trick is adding half a cup of water to the ground beef. The rice absorbs this added moisture (along with the moisture in the tomato sauce) during cooking, causing the grains to soften and swell in the oven like quills — hence the name “porcupine meatballs.” The cooked rick sticks out of the sides of the meatballs and gives them their signature look.

You can also make these meatballs with leftover cooked rice. To do so, use one cup cooked long-grain white rice in place of the uncooked rice and omit the half cup of water in the meatball mixture. The rice won’t stick out of the meatballs as much, but the meatballs will taste just as good.