Sometimes a word just sounds so funny that you laugh out loud the first time you hear it, and one of those words for me was фрикаделька, which means meatball. Why is it funny? I suppose it reminds me of words like roley-poley or higgledy-piggledy. In fact when I first heard it, I was sure it must have come from some kind of child's poem. I was wrong. Fasmer says that it was borrowed from German Frikadelle or French fricadelle, which originally came from Italian frittadella, meaning "fried in a pan." Despite the fact that the word in Italian meant 'fried,' фрикадельки in Russia aren't fried in a pan, but rather boiled in some kind of broth. Here's how it declines:

Although you usually encounter the word in the plural, it is also possible to find it in the singular. There is also a non-diminutive form фрикадель, although I haven't heard it in common speech.

Фрикадельки can be made of the flesh of pretty well any animal. When you are specifying what kind of meatballs they are, usually you use the preposition из followed by the genitive case of the type of meat. The four types I have encountered most often this summer are listed below. (I'll explain why I added Google hits in a moment.)

Sometimes you also hear the word фрикадельки preceded by an adjective to indicate the type of meat. I was curious which construction was more common, so I ran a Google hit comparison (2010-07-18) to determine that. Making grammatical judgments by a Google hit count is not a reliable way to understand the intricacies of grammar, but for what it's worth, it looks like the «из» construction is more common than the adjectival construction:

My favorite фрикадельки at the moment are the курино-говяжьи фрикадельки 'chicken and beef meatballs' served at the Трали-Вали dining room at ТГГПУ. Oddly enough, I don't get any hits on that phrase at all on Google, so perhaps they are a newer type of фрикадельки.

Here are some sample sentences with the word фрикадельки: