Photography by Michael Graydon & Nikole Herriott<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nA few days after I left Debora and Elvira in Rome for Emilia Romagna, I watched with a shvitz-ing Aperol spritz\u2014the Langhirano Valley was not windy that week\u2014as a handful of butchers wearing special mesh gloves competed with one another to hand-carve Parma hams. Their long spindly knives cruised through thick layers of fat and cured pork like violinists\u2019 bows for hours, but even when the competition ended, it was unclear who had won.<\/p>\n
There were pronouncements made about whose slices had been arranged the most artfully on dozens of paper plates, and about who had managed to retain the most yield from each leg of prosciutto, and about whose slices were the thinnest, but it wasn\u2019t obvious to an onlooker with a poor grasp of the language who exactly would be going home with the big win.<\/p>\n
I might have chalked up this as a social distaste toward the ways in which American capitalism has created constant, granular hierarchies\u2014if not for what happened that first night in Rome, after I went to Debora\u2019s bathroom to wash my hands and dry them on a frog-printed towel.<\/p>\n
When I emerged, Elvira was standing at the hot plate, quietly crying. No one but me and a stuffed frog peeking out from a potted plant had seemed to notice. The Judge was gesticulating from a love seat as he explained something about local politics, Elvira\u2019s daughter was eating a peach, and Debora was refilling the salt dish. But Elvira, prodding at the contents of one of the two pans, was wordlessly wiping tears as they collected in the corners of her eyes. I approached her at the hot plate; I didn\u2019t have to ask what was wrong. One of the skillets looked like it held the contents of an exploded hamster cage. There was no best way to make a meatball, but apparently she thought there was a worst way. Debora ushered me to the side, so Elvira could have a moment with her disappointment while I pretended not to study her. Within five minutes, Elvira was back to chiding me again, this time for flipping the next batch of meatballs a single second too soon. Still, the whole incident got me thinking about relativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Parma ham in Emilia-Romagna, Italy<\/p>\n
Photography by Michael Graydon & Nikole Herriott<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nEven in a culture (or subculture) skeptical of any one \u201cbest,\u201d the members of that culture still invent ways\u2014sometimes subtle ones\u2014to call things good or bad. In Emilia Romagna, at the hand-carving competition, contestant Fausto\u2019s 215-gram plate of leaf-thin prosciutto slices generated a gasp from the crowd, while contestant Flaminio\u2019s, arranged like a school of fish, got only gruff headshakes. And after much inquiry, at the end of a long night that included for some reason a drive-by visit from a local Italian chapter of the Hells Angels, I finally learned who won the carving competition: a butcher named Chantal, who would receive a \u201cwinner\u201d sticker to display in her shop for the coming year.<\/p>\n
Even where there was resistance to the idea of\u201cthe best,\u201d where it needn\u2019t be invoked in quite the same way to stoke competition, there was still ranking. There was still relativism, at least as a point of organization. No one person, place, or thing needed necessarily to be publicly proclaimed as the best as a matter of mass consensus, but it was important that each individual had an idea of what \u201cthe best\u201d meant to them. The titration of garlic in a meatball. The arrangement of prosciutto slices on a plate. These things mattered in that they said something about the person they mattered to.<\/p>\n\nObsessed with the Best: Optimized Recipes and Techniques from Rigorous Head-to-Head Cooking Tests<\/h2>\n $29.98.00, Amazon<\/p>\n
These \u201cbests\u201d had little to do with the status anxiety of America, where any sticker one could win in a meat carving contest would no doubt be large and loud, adorned with flashing lights and its own social media handle. And so they dissolved seamlessly into the narrative when I did indeed find my personal \u201cbest\u201d meatball on the Aventine Hill, the southernmost mound of Rome, a mythical site of an ancient competition to be \u201cthe best,\u201d in a mostly local way. The legend goes something like: Romulus and Remus decided to hold a contest of augury (basically, birdwatching to guess at the will of the gods), to decide whose name was slapped across the city. Remus set up camp on the Aventine Hill and Romulus, the Palatine. It\u2019s fairly obvious what happened next, and it\u2019s also fairly obvious why anyone who now owns real estate near the Aventine Hill might dismiss talk of said competition as culturally irrelevant. Still, on one morning of my trip, in an apartment on that Aventine hilltop, I broke into a meatball so tender that it seemed held together by sheer will. A meatball that was juicy and plush, and which percolated fat when sliced in two. I\u2019d watched its creator, a chef and food writer named Daniela Del Balzo<\/a>, make the mix and fry it, and I asked a million questions. Then I came home and tried to recreate it again and again. Eventually I wrote a recipe. Maybe they will be your ideal, too\u2014or maybe you\u2019ll dislike them. Either way, I\u2019ve come to realize that the best meatballs do not exist.<\/p>\nFind the recipe in Obsessed with the Best: 100+ Methodically Perfected Recipes Based on 20+ Head-to-Head Tests<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\nOriginally Appeared on Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveler<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n