Green bean casserole


Green bean casserole is a casserole consisting mostly of green beans, cream of mushroom soup, and french fried onions. The recipe was created in 1955 by Dorcas Reilly at the Campbell Soup Company. It is a very popular side dish for Thanksgiving dinners in the U.S. Campbell's estimated it was served in 20 million households in 2018.

History of the recipe

Dorcas Reilly led the team that created the recipe while working as a Campbell's staff member in the home economics department. The inspiration for the dish was "to create a quick and easy recipe around two things most Americans always had on hand in the 1950s: green beans and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup."
It was called "Green Bean Bake" when the recipe began being printed on soup cans. Initially the dish did not test well within the company but, in part because of Reilly's persistence, eventually earned a reputation for being "the ultimate comfort food."
Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom flavored soup variety was created circa 1934, and it had been widely so used as casserole filler in the Midwest that it was sometimes referred to as "Lutheran binder." Dorcas Reilly's recipe popularized the combination of the soup with green beans. Campbell's Soup now estimates that 40 percent of the Cream of Mushroom soup sold in the United States goes into making green bean casserole.
In the 1972 version of the Good Housekeeping Cookbook the recipe replaced the cream of mushroom soup with sour cream.
In 2002, Reilly presented the original recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. She died October 15, 2018, at the age of 92 in her hometown of Camden, New Jersey.