Some dishes just mean Thanksgiving. The turkey, of course. The stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the pumpkin pie. And for millions of American families, a bubbling dish of green beans in creamy mushroom sauce, topped with crunchy fried onions. It feels like it has been around forever.
Here's the short answer: green bean casserole was created in 1955 by Dorcas Reilly, a home economist at the Campbell's Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey. She developed it for an Associated Press feature that called for a quick, easy dish made with ingredients most households already had on hand. The recipe later went on Campbell's soup cans, and it became a Thanksgiving fixture in the 1960s.
A Soup That Wanted to Be a Sauce
The story really starts with cream of mushroom soup. Campbell's began making it in 1934, and it was the first of the company's soups to be marketed as a sauce as well as a soup.
Home cooks ran with the idea. In Minnesota, it became such a common filler in the region's beloved hotdish casseroles that people sometimes jokingly called it "Lutheran binder." Like other food companies, Campbell's hired recipe developers to dream up new ways to use its products.
Dorcas Reilly's Big Idea
Dorcas Reilly worked in Campbell's home economics department, and the idea was to keep things simple. Today's version of the recipe calls for green beans, mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, black pepper, and crisp fried onions. Some of the onions get mixed in, and the rest go on top for the final few minutes of baking.
The dish didn't impress everyone at first. It reportedly didn't test well inside the company. But thanks partly to Reilly's persistence, it went on to earn a reputation as "the ultimate comfort food." When the recipe was first printed on soup cans, it was called "Green Bean Bake."
Culinary historian Laura Shapiro called the crunchy onion topping a "touch of genius," giving an ordinary convenience-food side dish a little bit of glamour.
From Weeknight Side to Holiday Icon
Campbell's originally pitched the casserole as an everyday side dish. Once the recipe appeared on the label in the 1960s, it caught on as a Thanksgiving favorite. As of 2020, Campbell's estimated it was served at about 20 million Thanksgiving dinners a year. The recipe also made mushroom soup and green beans a famous pairing, a combination that has become a classic in its own right.
The company says about 40 percent of the cream of mushroom soup it sells in the U.S. ends up in some version of the dish. Its online recipe gets viewed millions of times on Thanksgiving Day alone, and Campbell's calls it the most popular recipe ever developed in its kitchens.
A Recipe Card in the Hall of Fame
In 2002, Reilly donated the original recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, and the occasion was celebrated with a meal featuring the dish. She passed away in 2018 at age 92 in her hometown of Camden.
Folklorist Lucy Long has noted that the dish appears on Thanksgiving tables across ethnic, economic, and religious lines. So when that familiar casserole comes out of the oven this year, you can thank a home economist from New Jersey who knew that a handful of crispy onions could make all the difference.
