Food You Can Eat: Celebrity Sunday Matinee: John Hancock’s Brandied Meatballs

Happy Independence Day to my fellow USAmericans! I personally love the 4th of July because I have bled it of any more significant meaning, like I have for Christmas and Thanksgiving. It is a time to gather together and eat, barring a global pandemic or other calamity. Best of all the 4th of July occurs during American summer, and we in the Northeast finally get reliably hot weather. 

For this CSM I went to the cast list for one of Roland Emmerich’s greatest movies, 1996’s Independence Day, to see if any of the stars at some point proffered a recipe I could pass along. I was really hoping for something from Harvey Feirstein’s or Will “Slap” Smith’s childhood memories, but no, nothing. I did find this strange recipe related somehow to John Hancock, most famous for his signature on the “Declaration of Independence,” but I’ll talk about that after I finally get through the recipe.

I’ll try to be brief. John Hancock was born into a middle-/upper-middle-class family in the town of Braintree, MA, and was casually acquainted with another resident, John Adams. They came from a part of town that eventually broke off and became known as Quincy.

When Hancock’s father died (the fate of his mother is unrecorded by wikipedia) he was sent off to live with his uncle Thomas and his wife. In a supremely good stroke of luck, they were childless and took him in like a son. Thomas was also one of the wealthiest men in the 13 colonies, possessor of a hugely lucrative shipping/trading business called the House of Hancock and a grand house and grounds on the English model called Hancock Manor. It occupied a good chunk of Beacon Hill, so that was nice.

Conveniently for our Jack, by now graduated from Boston Latin and Harvard, Uncle Tommy died and left all this to him. The House of Hancock thrived. But then his acquaintance John Adams and especially his perpetually outraged cousin Sam started stirring up trouble, and our Jack was not immune to this, having had one of his sloops impounded by The Mother Country for smuggling. Boston became a hotbed of treason and sedition, replacing its founding tradition of religious wackiness, detailed exquisitely in Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates. Hancock supported all kinds of anti-British groups (why, I don’t know, since his principal trading partner was Britain), the British occupied Boston, the Boston Tea Party, the British took over Hancock Manor, our Jack holed up in Lexington, there to witness the Battle of Lexington and Concord, you can imagine how all this went. 

Continental Congress and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the act that Hancock is probably most famous for, before he became an insurance company. He said he wrote his name large (really large, you should see an image of it) on the Declaration of Independence so King George III could read it “without spectacles and may double his reward on my head.” During the Revolutionary War he became estranged from George Washington because he thought he should lead the Continental Army (noblesse oblige) and also fell out with John Adams. Everyone fell out with John Adams. He was irascible to say the least. Governor of Massachusetts, ill health, dead at 56. There, that’s enough. 

Here is the strange recipe which, like the the reason for the sudden disappearance of my metabolism, is shrouded in mystery. I’ll tell you more about it later.

John Hancock’s Brandied Meatballs

Sauce:

1 jar peach preserves (18 oz)

3/4 cup light brown sugar — firmly packed

1/2 cup brandy

1/2 cup peach brandy or peach nectar

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Meatballs:

2 pounds lean ground beef

3/4 cup milk

1/2 cup dry bread crumbs

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

2 dashes hot-pepper sauce

2 tablespoons shortening or oil

1 tablespoon cornstarch combined with 1 tablespoon water (if needed)

To make the sauce: In a medium bowl, combine the preserves, brown sugar, brandy, peach brandy or peach nectar and nutmeg, stirring until thoroughly blended. Set aside.

To make the meatballs: In a large bowl, combine the ground beef, milk, bread crumbs, Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, salt, nutmeg, ginger, pepper and hot-pepper sauce. Shape the mixture into 1-1/2-inch to 2-inch balls.

Heat the shortening or oil in a large skillet and brown the meatballs. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.

Lower the heat, pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the meat drippings and blend in the sauce. Simmer for 10 minutes. Add the meatballs to the sauce and coat them thoroughly. Cover and simmer for 45 to 60 minutes. If needed, add the cornstarch and water mixture, stirring constantly, and cook over low heat until thickened. Transfer to a chafing dish* for serving.

*I cannot say enough good things about chafing dishes when you’re having a group over. This recipe makes 40 meatballs, so you’ll want to keep them warm in the chafing dish, even though it is 90+ degrees and 90+% humidity because it is July 4th. I wouldn’t eat these at room temp or cooler or as leftovers.

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This recipe came to me from a website that reprinted it from something called Bulfinch’s Boston Faire. Amazon tells me that this was a limited run (1,000 copies) printed in 1985. Bulfinch was an architect, not a colonial celebrity chef; he was to Olde Boston as Wren was to Olde London, so I don’t know…maybe Boston has a Bulfinch Society (I bet they do) and this was a fundraising lure? Or swag at some annual event? Hancock married into the politically influential Quincy family (so did frenemy John Adams) but their two children died young and “without issue,” as the highbrow British press would say. There’s no one around to ask, 200+ years later.