Veal and pork meatballs slowly stewed with cuttlefish and peas: a classic Catalan surf-and-turf, at Carrer de la Cera, 49.
We make them with minced veal, pork and cured pork belly, bread soaked in milk, egg, garlic and parsley. We dust them in chickpea flour, fry them and finish them in the pot over a low heat with cuttlefish, peas, tomato and slow-cooked onion. They come out soft and with plenty of sauce: ask for bread.
€16.50
Meatballs are as old as written cookery. The Romans already made them: they called them isicium, from the verb to chop, and the cookbook of Apicius, from the first century, has around twenty recipes. With no mincing machines, the meat was chopped by hand, which made them food for wealthy households.
The name comes from Arabic: al-búnduqa gave Castilian albóndigas and, from there, Catalan mandonguilles, already found in writing in the seventeenth century. In Catalonia they are made with pork and veal mixed, fried and then stewed with a sofregit; in Barcelona they are known as “mandonguilles amb suc”, meatballs with sauce. With peas they are a spring stew, when peas are in season, and in Barcelona they are made, like ours, with pork, veal and cured pork belly.
They are inn food too. The folklorist Joan Amades records that in early twentieth-century Barcelona fifteen cèntims bought a choice of offal, fricandó or meatballs in sauce. And Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who wrote Can Lluís into his Pepe Carvalho stories, stood up for the soft meatball, made with breadcrumb and egg, against the kind that turns out hard as a stone.
The pairing in our dish is in Montalbán’s La cocina de los mediterráneos too, as “sepia con albóndigas”: cuttlefish cooked on a sofregit of onion and tomato, pork meatballs made with bread soaked in milk, and a picada of almonds to finish.
If you like slow-cooked stews, try the Can Lluís stewed snails too (€18.90).
Further reading: Història de la cuina catalana i occitana, vol. VIII, by Vicent Marqués (Edicions Sidillà, 2025), and La cocina de los mediterráneos, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Ediciones B, 2002).
