Green bean casserole was invented in 1955 by Dorcas Reilly, a home economics supervisor in the Campbell Soup Company test kitchen in Camden, New Jersey, who put it together for an Associated Press feature. Fifty years later, when the AP came back to interview her for the anniversary, she said she did not remember having a hand in it.
That is the whole oddity of this dish. It has a named inventor, a year, a building and a surviving recipe card, which is more paperwork than most foods can show. And the inventor herself could not recall the afternoon. So the credit gets argued over anyway, among a woman, a company, a wire service, a can of soup and a paper label.
Dorcas Reilly, who invented green bean casserole and forgot
She was born Dorcas Lillian Bates in Woodbury, New Jersey, on July 22, 1926, and grew up in Glassboro and Camden. She took a home economics degree at Drexel in 1947, one of the first people in her family to go to college, and joined Campbell's at the end of the 1940s as one of the first full-time members of its Home Economics department. A photograph the company still publishes shows her on the set of live television commercials, filmed on top of the original Camden plant.
By 1955 she was a supervisor in the kitchen. Much of its work was finding new things for home cooks to do with a can of soup. Reilly and her colleagues turned out hundreds of recipes, and she is also credited with a tomato soup meatloaf, a tuna noodle casserole and the "souperburger", a relative of the Sloppy Joe. The green bean dish was one more card in the file.
That is how she explained her blank memory in 2005. According to the AP, she said she did not remember having a hand in it, because hundreds of dishes were developed during her years at Campbell's. In 1955 this vegetable side was one card among many.
She did say she kept the ingredients at home in case somebody asked her to make one. And she had seen enough recipe contests to watch her own work come back to her under other names. "It would be Aunt Suzy's or Grandma's," she told the AP.
What was in the original 1955 green bean casserole recipe?
Campbell's has never been shy about the dish, and its own account quietly complicates the lone-inventor story. The company calls Reilly "the driving force" behind the casserole, according to the AP obituary. That is a phrase you use about a team leader. Reilly herself, NPR reported in 2018, always insisted it was a team effort.
The company's history page also describes a recipe that was edited down. Reilly's test versions tried Worcestershire sauce, celery salt and ham, and all three have since been removed. The 2018 obituaries describe six pantry ingredients. The version on Campbell's recipe site today lists five: cream of mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, cooked green beans and French fried onions.
The card does not say "casserole" at all. Campbell's says the original name, and the title on the card in the Hall of Fame, was "Green Bean Bake".
So Campbell's has a fair claim to a share. It paid the salary, owned the kitchen and made the soup. What it does not have is a different name to put forward. Every version of the story the company tells has Reilly in it.
The Associated Press, which asked the question
The third claimant is the customer. The casserole exists because a wire service wanted copy. The dish was made for an AP feature, and the request, as later accounts describe it, was for something quick and easy that used ingredients most American households kept on hand.
A request like that does a lot of the designing. It points away from anything that takes skill and straight at a can of beans and a can of soup. The AP's food editor from 1947 to 1986 was Cecily Brownstone, but none of the sources read for this piece names who actually asked Camden for the recipe.
Some 2018 obituaries say Reilly was charged with a Thanksgiving side dish. Campbell's own history says otherwise: the recipe was developed as an everyday side and did not take off as a Thanksgiving favorite until the 1960s. The company has less reason to play down Thanksgiving than anyone, so its version is the better supported one.
The soup that was already in every hotdish
Then there is the argument that Reilly invented nothing much, because the idea was sitting in the pantry. Campbell's began canning cream of mushroom soup in 1934, and cooks took to it as a ready-made sauce for casseroles.
In the upper Midwest it became the usual glue for hotdish, the one-pan church supper. The earliest written hotdish recipe usually cited is in a 1930 church cookbook from Mankato, Minnesota. Minnesotans came to call the soup "Lutheran binder", after all the Lutheran church cookbooks it appears in.
Much of the postwar canned pantry grew out of wartime food engineering, and by the 1950s a vegetable baked in mushroom soup was no novelty. It is quite possible some home cook baked green beans in it before 1955. No dated recipe to that effect turned up in the research for this article, and an unrecorded casserole is not much of a rival claim.
What the 1955 card added was the top. Canned fried onions, scattered over a soft grey-green bake, gave it crunch and something to look at. The food historian Laura Shapiro, author of a book on 1950s American dinners, told NPR in 2018 that "the reason people like it decade after decade has everything to do with the French fried onion rings." Take them away and the dish is one more hotdish. Unlike the foods that really were invented by accident, this one was built to a specification, and the onions are where the design shows.
Why do we eat green bean casserole at Thanksgiving?
Mostly because of a label. A newspaper feature runs once. A recipe printed on the soup can is in the kitchen every time someone buys the soup.
Sources differ slightly on when. One account, drawing on the Washington Post, says Campbell's started printing the recipe on cream of mushroom cans in 1960. The company itself says only that it became a Thanksgiving favorite "in the 1960s" after the label appeared. Either way, the recipe was in the shopper's hand at the moment she was deciding what to do with the can.
It also fit the meal. Turkey takes the oven for hours, and a dish that takes ten minutes to put together and half an hour to bake can go in at the end. It needs nothing fresh in late November. Campbell's, as the AP put it, says even poor cooks can make it. The menu it joined was already a fairly recent assembly, as the real history of Thanksgiving food and of the turkey at its center shows, so there was room.
The numbers Campbell's publishes are its own and have moved around. In 2018 it estimated that 40 percent of the cream of mushroom soup it sold in the United States went into green bean casserole. More recently it has said the dish is on more than half of American Thanksgiving tables, and that half of the soup's yearly sales fall between November and January.
Green bean casserole history, and the card in Akron
| Year | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| 1934 | Campbell's starts canning cream of mushroom soup |
| 1955 | Reilly's kitchen produces "Green Bean Bake" for an AP feature |
| 1960 | The recipe goes on the soup can (the company says "the 1960s") |
| 1961 | Reilly leaves Campbell's to raise her children |
| 1981 | She returns as manager of the Campbell's kitchen |
| 1988 | She retires as manager of the kitchen |
| 2002 | The recipe card is donated to the National Inventors Hall of Fame |
Give it to Reilly. The soup was Campbell's, the question was the AP's, and the habit of baking vegetables in mushroom soup belonged to a great many anonymous cooks. But the specific six-ingredient dish with the onions on top came out of the kitchen she supervised, in 1955, under her hand, and no other person has ever been named for it. Her not remembering is, if anything, a point in favor of the story. Invented legends tend to come with a vivid scene.
In 2002 Reilly and Campbell's gave the original card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. Campbell's likes to point out that it sits in the same building as Thomas Edison's light bulb.
Reilly retired from the kitchen in 1988. She died of Alzheimer's disease on October 15, 2018, in Camden at 92, survived by Thomas Reilly, her husband of 59 years, and a son and a daughter. The service was held in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Thanksgiving fell on November 22 that year.
Questions people ask
What was in the original green bean casserole recipe?
The original 1955 recipe from the Campbell's test kitchen in Camden, New Jersey, was called "Green Bean Bake". The version on Campbell's recipe site today lists five ingredients: cream of mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, cooked green beans and French fried onions. Reilly's test versions also tried Worcestershire sauce, celery salt and ham.
When did green bean casserole become a Thanksgiving dish?
Green bean casserole became a Thanksgiving favorite in the 1960s, according to Campbell's. The company had developed it in 1955 as an everyday side dish. One account says Campbell's began printing the recipe on cream of mushroom soup cans in 1960, which put it in front of shoppers buying the soup.
Who was Dorcas Reilly?
Dorcas Reilly was a home economics supervisor at the Campbell Soup Company test kitchen in Camden, New Jersey. She developed hundreds of recipes there, including a tuna noodle casserole and the "souperburger". She retired as kitchen manager in 1988 and died on October 15, 2018, at 92.
Where is the original green bean casserole recipe card?
The original recipe card is held by the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. Dorcas Reilly and Campbell's donated it in 2002. Campbell's likes to point out that it sits in the same building as Thomas Edison's light bulb.
Filed under Origin Stories, Ritual Foods
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