Love it or hate it, green bean casserole has been a staple of the holiday table for for more than 60 years.
While plenty of Americans might think that their loving grandmother invented the recipe, green bean casserole originated in 1955 in the Camden, N.J. test kitchen of the Campell’s Soup Company, where 29-year-old home economist and team leader Dorcas Reilly created the dish.
Reilly was the originator of what has become a classic comfort food, but there are three different versions of her inspiration.
One tale has Reilly inventing the dish as a spur-of-the-moment lark. Another story has Reilly creating a recipe, in response to an Associated Press call for easy-to-make side dishes.
The most-repeated version has Reilly following orders from Campbell’s to create a dish that would sell more soup.
Reilly herself could not remember what triggered her inventive spark.
“It was just another day’s work.” Reilly once said. “It was one of several hundred recipes we developed that year.”
Whether her inspiration came from within, the Associated Press wire, or the Campbell’s company, Reilly decided to create a dish from ingredients found in most mid-century kitchens. She and her team experimented until she settled on what was initially called green bean bake.
During the testing stages, Cole added bacon and fresh onions to the casserole before deciding to stick with six common ingredients: green beans (frozen or canned), cream of mushroom soup, packaged fried onions, milk, black pepper and soy sauce.
The original recipe took 10 minutes to prepare and 30 minutes to bake. It was not only simple, but also fairly inexpensive.
Convenience was the driving force behind mid-century cookery. While some modern chefs alter the recipe – using fresh green beans, soup made from scratch and home-fried onions – post-war chefs idealized the new appliances and easy access to packaged foods that took the drudgery out of cooking.
Why clean, snap and blanch beans yourself, when you could simply buy them frozen? Why go to all the trouble of whipping up soup from scratch, when the supermarket shelves were lined with cans of cream of mushroom? This was, after all, the era that gave us the epitome of convenience: the TV dinner.
As more women entered the workforce in the 1950s, the new, modern kitchen encouraged that trend, which continued for the next four decades.
Of course, Reilly was one of those women. One of the first in her family to attend college, she was a pioneering food scientist at a time, when the corporate kitchen was still the domain of male cooks. Single and only 29 years old when she created green bean casserole, Reilly continued to experiment in the Campbell’s kitchen until 1961, when she became a stay-at-home mom. She returned to Campbell’s 20 years later, where she managed the test kitchen until her retirement.
Reilly herself considered the popularity and longevity of her green bean dish to be somewhat of a mystery, but she guessed that the recipe’s status as “the mother of all comfort foods.”
“It’s relatively inexpensive, it’s attractive, and it’s something you can take to a potluck, and it’s easy to make,” Reilly said.
While some claim the recipe’s appeal lies in the crunch of the onions or the salt and fat of the Campbell’s soup, culinary history Linda Shapiro regards the dish as more of a cultural touchstone.
“Green bean casserole’s secret weapon is its familiarity,” said Shapiro. “Thanksgiving, you don’t necessarily want something new. Food people are always saying, ‘time for bok choy, sauteed with a little sprinkling of proscuitto.’ No, people don’t want that. They want green bean casserole – just as they did in 1955 – because it reminds them of themselves.”
More than 60 years after its introduction, 40 percent of all Cream of Mushroom soup goes into green bean casserole and Campbell’s receives 10,000 requests for the recipe every year. Twenty million Americans will eat the dish over this holiday season, a number that translates to at least 530 residents of Graham County ladling the concoction onto their Thanksgiving plates this week.
In 2002, Reilly’s original recipe card for Green Bean Bake entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, but the inventor never took her success too seriously.
“Food should be happy,” Reilly said. “Food should be fun.”
Reilly continued experimenting in her own kitchen as she entered her 10th decade. Before she died last year at the age of 92, Reilly left fans of her signature dish with a final wish.
“I hope you enjoy green bean casserole forever.”