Julie's Pizza Fondue

A rediscovered family favorite straight out of the 1970's!

Family recipes are one of my favorite things to explore on my blog. So many of them are things I’ve grown up eating for so long, or hold such special places in our hearts that the idea of preserving them online, sharing them with everyone, and just plain learning how to bring them to life has a lot of appeal. Getting at the history behind them is a lot of fun too – I loved my maternal grandma’s story of how she realized her Lazy Jane Casserole is actually just an easier version of Julia Child’s famous beef bourguignon! 

This one is a little more enigmatic than most of the family recipes I’ve spotlighted in the past. Unlike the others, this recipe was actually lost for years, and many people figured they would never get to eat it again. Its history is still a little foggy, but at long last, I got to make and try my paternal grandma’s famous pizza fondue! And I’m very excited to share the recipe with all of you. Read on to see how you can make this 1970’s favorite of my dad and his four sisters!

My dad and his sisters spent their early childhood in Corning, New York. My grandpa worked for Corning Glass, and when my dad was in middle school, it was announced that the family would be moving to England because of my grandpa’s new promotion. After a few years there, they moved to France thanks to another promotion. When we were in Paris last summer, I finally got to see a lot of my dad and aunts’ old haunts, including the apartment they lived in and the grocery store my grandma would do her shopping at. 

One of their favorite dinners in this era was my grandma’s pizza fondue. I’ve heard my dad and aunts talk about this extremely fondly for years, but never got to eat it myself. For some reason, when the family moved back to the US in the 1980’s, my grandma made it a couple more times, but it just didn’t taste the same anymore. Eventually, she stopped making it entirely, and the recipe was considered lost to history. There’s some debate about what exactly happened, and unfortunately she passed away last year so I can’t ask her to clarify the story at all, but the consensus among my dad and the aunts was that she probably couldn’t get the cheeses she used to make the dish in the US, and because she’d lost the recipe, we couldn’t go back and try to find them ourselves years later. 

Now, it’s not like my dad talked about this every single hour of every single day, but I definitely heard him talk about the dish extremely fondly many a time over my 27 years on this planet, and I was always very intrigued by the sound of it. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Pizza’s delicious, fondue is a lot of fun, sounds like a match made in heaven, right? I was always disappointed that I hadn’t gotten a chance to try it for myself to see what was so special about this family classic. 

Enter one of my grandma’s old friends. While chatting with one of my aunts, it was revealed that she had the pizza fondue recipe! She quickly hooked my aunt up with it, and said aunt gave it a try. She eagerly informed the rest of us that the recipe did indeed taste as she remembered it should, and I just as eagerly asked for her to send it to me. Now that I’ve been reunited with my fondue pot, I immediately added it to the schedule to try out as soon as possible. 

Interestingly, Julie’s Cooking Studio includes a recipe for pizza fondue, but it’s extremely different from the one I’m about to share with you. The Cooking Studio’s recipe is essentially just heated pizza sauce, with cheese, sausage, bread, and whatever other pizza toppings you might like to dip into hot sauce as things to dunk into your "fondue". It’s very simple to make, and it sounds tasty enough, but that’s not the pizza fondue I’m going to share with you today. 

My grandma’s pizza fondue starts with chopping a medium onion and browning it in a pan with 1/2 pound of ground beef. Once the meat’s cooked through, take it off the heat to drain the fat off.

Next, add 20 ounces of prepared pizza sauce, 2 tablespoons of cornstarch, 1 1/2 teaspoons of fennel seeds, 1 1/2 teaspoons of oregano, 1/2 teaspoons of garlic powder, 10 ounces of grated cheddar cheese, and 1 cup of shredded mozzarella to the pan and mix together until the cheese has melted. 

That’s right. The exotic French cheese was apparently cheddar and mozzarella. 

As the cheese started to melt, I definitely saw it getting that really satisfying cheese pull look that good fondue gets. Also, it smelled really nice.

Transferring it to the fondue pot went fine, although keeping it warm in the pot was an annoying challenge. My fondue pot is electric, so it doesn’t have a steady flame keeping the contents warm. It made reheating and keeping it hot a very start and stop business with a lot of troubleshooting.

Unlike the Cooking Studio recipe, my grandma’s recipe calls for dunking in cubes of toasted French bread only. Makes sense, considering you already have all the other ingredients spoken for in the fondue. 

Interestingly, the cheese stopped doing the nice pull as soon as we got it into the pot. I think the stop-start heat from here on our kind of affected the texture of the fondue. 

But taste wise?

This was super yummy. Probably not surprising to say right, considering pizza’s almost universal popularity. It honestly reminded me a lot of the frozen French bread pizzas I used to eat for a quick lunch on weekends growing up, which were also a favorite of my dad’s, but that’s admittedly probably because the texture and flavor of the French bread were extremely similar to the bread used in those frozen meals. The fondue itself tasted very heavily of the pizza sauce, with the cheese taking a bit of a back seat flavor wise, but the spices and textures were all very nice. 

One downside: this was extremely, extremely heavy, and it makes a lot of fondue. It's also not at all Weight Watcher friendly, if you get what I mean. I totally understand why my grandma would make this for her five kids because you really don’t need to eat a lot to feel very, very full. On top of that, it’s almost a one pan dish and isn’t asking for a lot of ingredients or prep, all of which make recipes winners when you’ve got a lot of mouths to feed. Jess and I definitely regretted not inviting friends over to help us eat it, although we’re planning to see if the leftovers can be repurposed as a pasta sauce or bake. 

So, what exactly happened that led everyone to believe that they couldn’t recreate this dish in the US? 

Honestly, I’m wondering if it’s maybe the pizza sauce that’s to blame. I can definitely see how there would have been wildly different brands available in the US and France in the 70’s and 80’s. As that was the most overpowering flavor in the finished product, a bad sauce, or just a different sauce would really change the overall flavor of the fondue. Without something like Amazon or novelty grocery websites, my grandma wouldn’t have had any way to get the brand she was using in France, and experimenting with American brands probably wasn’t worth it after the first couple tries didn’t go over so well with the kids. 

Does this taste exactly like the pizza fondue my dad grew up eating? I’m not sure. My aunt was pleased with the results when she made it, but my dad wasn’t in DC with me to give my batch a shot. I’d be very interested to make it again next time the family’s all together and see what he thinks about it. 

Until then, this is a really tasty, quick meal or appetizer to throw together. If you don’t have a fondue pot, you can keep it warm in a slow cooker and just eat it out of there. There’s more than enough to share with friends and family, and it makes a really satisfying thing to make on a cold winter day. Whether or not it’s exactly the same thing my grandma made during the family’s European adventure, it was a lot of fun to finally get to make something similar to a family favorite we all thought was lost to history.

And one that we'll definitely be making again when we have a crowd who can help us eat it!