Pineapple Glazed Meatballs

Ground pork has more flavor than beef for this recipe. Don't overmix the meat or meatballs become tough. The sauce should coat the back of a spoon. These hold well in a slow cooker on warm for party service.

Sweet and sour meatballs became a fixture of mid-century American party food as slow cookers and electric chafing dishes made keeping hot appetizers warm at parties practical from the 1970s onward. The use of pineapple as a sweet-sour element in American cooking was accelerated by the introduction of commercially canned pineapple: Hawaiian pineapple canning began with the Dole company's operations starting in 1901, and by the 1920s and 1930s, canned pineapple had become a standard American pantry ingredient, appearing in savory and sweet preparations across the country. The tiki culture of the 1950s and 1960s — built on Americans' post-war fascination with Polynesia following the Pacific theater of World War II — established pineapple as shorthand for "tropical-exotic" flavor, ensuring its place in the imaginary Polynesian cuisine of tiki restaurants. The combination of pineapple and soy sauce, which appears in countless mid-century American recipes described as "Hawaiian" or "Polynesian," is not an authentic traditional Pacific Island preparation but an American adaptation that drew loosely from the sweet-savory flavor profiles of East Asian cooking as interpreted through tiki-era lens. The format remains effective: the natural acidity of pineapple juice both tenderizes and brightens a rich meatball glaze.