Bon Appetit, June 1976
Easy, nutritious and attractive.
I can’t tell you how excited I was to discover the Avocado Meatza. This was everything that I had been hoping for in retro cooking – meat, cheese, bacon and a healthy dose of weird.
The meatza was featured in a Bon Appetit article about the joys of cooking with convenience foods or, as Bon Appetit likes to call them, “those magic packets and cans“. And this is where the difficulty lay in making the meatza. There were two key ingredients that (despite searching through and around all those ridiculous fresh vegetables) I couldn’t find. One was instant minced onion and the other was condensed cheddar cheese soup.
A search online opened my eyes to an incredible injustice. Campbells Cheddar Cheese Soup, while readily available in the US, hasn’t made it to little old Australia. Muttering to myself and mentally writing letters to Campbells, we made it from scratch. The result probably wasn’t as condensed as it could have been but it tasted ok and I thought bacon would probably float on it. You know your cooking has taken strange and disconcerting path when you are judging your food by how well bacon will float.
So to make the meatza, make a little bed of baked meat, carefully pour in your cheese soup, float on the avocado and bacon, perch cherry tomatoes at a slightly rakish angle and then bake.
It didn’t turn out completely as planned. The avocado went a bit brown, the bacon did sink a bit and the meat wasn’t completely cooked through.
Here’s the scary thing though. It didn’t taste that bad (although Emma hated it). Sort of like a McDonalds Cheese Burger on the way home after a big night. That said, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t make it again (or if I did I would pull down the blinds, not tell anyone, gorge in meaty cheesy craziness and pretend it never happened).
Meaty cheesy craziness close up
Bad Jelly 
OMG. You are now, officially, my hero! I saw that recipe a few years back in a compilation of bad Bon Appetit recipes and was a bit in awe at the sheer volume of meat pictured. Gold star to you for making it…I no longer have to wonder what it would be like…
That’s fantastic! Although I’m not sure whether I’m proud or ashamed to live in a world where instant minced onions are a thing.
Sadly, I have those onions in my spice rack. They are great when you don’t want to chop an onion. Look in the spice isle for them. As for the whole cooked avocado thing, NO, just NO!
Love avocados, but NOT baked or cooked. To me, avocados are only eaten raw. This might be good if you left off the avocado before cooking or baking, and served them with the finished product as a garnish.
Retro recipes are a very recent obsession of mine that I discovered last weekend, when my husband and I saw some vintage 40’s era Chiquita banana commercials on YouTube.
Some of them (just about 90% of the stuff in jello molds) are not salvageable, but a few with some tweaks, and new names, would have a chance I think.
Completely agree – as a general rule avocado is not great warm!