Dorcas Tarbell restocks her 97-year-old father’s fridge from a grocery list he gives her every week. One of the items that’s often on that list is a frozen TV dinner of green bean casserole.
Thomas H. Reilly has eaten many green bean casseroles in his day, as his wife, Dorcas B. Reilly (Ms. Tarbell’s mother) invented it with her team in 1955 while working at the Campbell Soup Company test kitchen in Camden, N.J.
“One of her big jobs was developing recipes using Campbell’s products to go on the Campbell’s labels,” he said. The most famous of those recipes was, undeniably, the green bean casserole. Many home cooks still follow Ms. Reilly’s formula, while others, like me, have riffed on it over the years from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving.
Recipe: Green Bean Casserole
Ms. Reilly’s original creation, then called Green Bean Bake, comprised six ingredients: canned cream of mushroom soup, milk, green beans, French-fried onions, black pepper and soy sauce.
Afternoons at 3, a panel of home economists who worked in the Campbell’s test kitchen would sample the day’s recipe tests and rate them from 1 to 5. Mr. Reilly said that dash of soy sauce at the end — his wife’s contribution — was what made the dish. “After that,” he said, “it was bingo.”
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According to the food historian Laura Shapiro, Ms. Reilly was “a real innovator. Nobody had added the onion rings to a casserole before she did.”
Though the recipe itself was an innovation, the inspiration for it came from a dish the longtime food editor and writer Cecily Brownstone had eaten at a press luncheon in Florida. She tapped Campbell’s for help in creating a version of the casserole for her Associated Press column, and published the first iteration of Ms. Reilly’s recipe in April 1955.
Ms. Brownstone called the recipe “Beans and Stuff” and described it as “a simple casserole of green beans with an intriguing topping.” It included celery salt and canned cream of mushroom soup, a popular product at a time when casseroles had, as Ms. Shapiro said, “swept the nation.”
The green bean casserole met people where they were, and was simple to throw together — dump everything in a dish and bake. That it is still, according to Campbell’s, a staple on 21 million Thanksgiving tables every year is a testament to its staying power.
Ms. Reilly died in 2018, but her memory is etched into this dish’s ingredients and directions, which are immortalized on the original recipe card, now yellowed and in the collection of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, in Alexandria, Va.
What makes this particular casserole click?
I cooked and tasted about 13 green bean casserole recipes to find out, and to track the dish’s path from the 1950s to today. My aim wasn’t to improve the original, but to honor its careful calibration of flavors by replicating them from scratch.
As when a child takes apart a toy to better understand its parts, taking the extra step to make your own sauce and cook your own beans not only results in a flavor bomb but also underscores Ms. Reilly’s contribution.
Here’s what I learned:
For the sauce, focus on the “cream,” not the “mushroom.”
As delicious as fresh mushrooms concentrated to their savoriest essence can be, slicing and cooking them down is not an economical use of time, especially on Thanksgiving. Also, without the mushrooms, the green beans can fully shine.
There are other ways to arrive at savoriness, and in the spirit of midcentury American cooking, I reached into my pantry for celery salt, a quiet whisperer of umami and an ingredient in Ms. Reilly’s first version. It will make your kitchen smell like Thanksgiving incarnate, as if you’ve been chopping vegetables all day.
In lieu of the canned soup is a homemade white sauce that takes 10 minutes to prepare. It turns out that heavy cream, thickened with a simple blend of butter and flour, is supreme at carrying and amplifying gentle flavors like celery and nutmeg.
Consider the green bean. (And cook it longer!)
There’s great nostalgia in canned green beans. For many (including my brother, Kevin), if a green bean casserole doesn’t have that taste, then it’s not green bean casserole.
I managed to capture — and improve — that flavor by braising frozen cut green beans in a heavily seasoned chicken broth to bring out their vegetal nuttiness. Not only are these beans comforting and delicious, but they leave you with the most aromatic broth, an ultrasavory green bean elixir that can then intensify the creamy sauce. Canned green beans could never withstand a long simmer — they would disintegrate.
If it’s mushy brown vegetables you’re worried about, don’t worry. Half of those frozen beans are folded into the braised beans and creamy sauce right before baking to maintain their color and bite.
French’s crispy fried onions cannot be improved.
Don’t even try. Though homemade fried onions can be great, I wanted to stick to the spirit of the original by not fixing what isn’t broken. In this case, store-bought is just better.
Canned French-fried onions should be considered a key ingredient in their own right. They add undeniable savoriness and crunch without the extra grease (both elbow and otherwise). And let’s be real: They’re everyone’s favorite part.
That brilliant move came straight from the first version of the casserole by Ms. Reilly, who studied home economics at the Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia. After graduating in 1947, she worked for Philadelphia Electric for a couple of years, where she demonstrated how to operate electric ranges for the many women who bought them after World War II.
Did she know that just a few years later, she and her team would invent what would become one of the most famous Thanksgiving dishes in America?
“She had no idea,” her daughter said.
But look at the green bean casserole now:It’s the kind of economical home cooking you can make your own, a dish you can find everywhere. You can even buy it in the freezer aisle.
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