Meatball
A meatball is a type of comestible. Meatballs have very little nutritional value, but carnivorous creatures consider them treats similar to tripe rations. Throwing one at a cat or dog will tame it, and they can be fed to carnivorous pets to increase their tameness and apport.
Generation
Meatballs are created by zapping a spell of stone to flesh at rocks, valuable gems, gray stones, and statues of Tiny-sized or non-fleshy monsters. (Pieces of glass are not affected and do not turn into meatballs.)
Strategy
Obtaining
Since the spellbook of stone to flesh is a rare find and isn't particularly easy to cast, it's not easy to create meatballs unless you are a healer; wizards and priests are also eligible to get stone to flesh as one of their starting spells. However, once you do have the spell, it is easy to get hundreds of meatballs out of a single casting. All you need to do is gather lots of rocks (easily obtained via smashing boulders and statues) in one place, and then cast the spell at them.
Pets
As they provide little nutrition, the most direct use of meatballs is to feed them to your carnivorous pets to increase their tameness (important if you plan on using a polymorph trap to turn it into a non-eating pet), or to increase apport to train them for stealing from shops. They are also useful in a pinch for taming a hostile cat or dog.
Polypiling
Meatballs make excellent comestible polyfodder since they can usually be obtained in large quantities, are lightweight, and can polymorph into any randomly generated comestible, including lembas wafers, tins of spinach and tengu meat, cockatrice eggs, and other uncommon comestibles. Note, however, that getting eggs or tins of a specific monster type will likely require a lot of polypiling and great numbers of meatballs. In a pinch where a player is strapped for money, meatballs can also be polypiled into comestibles to sell at a general store or delicatessen.
Polypiling a large quantity of meatballs will likely to cause a flesh golem to form; this can be done deliberately and combined with a magical means of taming to obtain a useful pet for the lower levels, as golems have low monster MR. You can then upgrade it into a more powerful stone golem by hitting it with a cockatrice corpse.
Encyclopedia entry
Interestingly, meatball shares its entry with the huge chunk of meat:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some would eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.
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