How Green Bean Casserole Took Over the American Table, A 70-Year History

Article by Chadwick Boyd | Photos by Chadwick Boyd | Published November 20, 2025

If you want to understand who America becomes when we cook, look at the dish more than 20 million households make every holiday season. Watch as it comes to the table, steaming and bubbling with those signature crispy onion bits on top that make everyone salivate. People reach for the spoon even before a blessing is said. It’s familiar and comforting…in a way that shifts the room.

A recipe that has lived this long in our kitchens can do that. Green Bean Casserole has moved across generations with an ease most dishes never achieve. It shows who we are when we cook not to impress, but to belong.

Belonging has always been the quiet engine of this casserole. It asks nothing except to show up. It’s the kind of dish that doesn’t require performance, only presence.

Eric Kim, food columnist for The New York Times and author of “Korean American:  Food That Tastes Like Home,” explains, “The original recipe…is like a uniquely minted and widely shared idea in our consciousness as Americans.”

That truth plays out every year. People who never think twice about vegetables lean in for a scoop. Teenagers home from college raid the refrigerator the next day for whatever is left. They crave the taste…and the feeling.

The comfort is physical. Almost visceral. The creaminess softens a year and its rough edges. Its warmth draws everyone back into the same orbit again. Black pepper and that sly lift of soy wake people’s palates. The sauce gathers the beans the way a holiday meal pulls guests closer. And the crunch, that sharp, salty crackle, cuts through the richness and keeps every forkful alive.

For many, the dish becomes the unofficial emotional center of the table, quietly binding the meal, and the people around it, together.

Long before a recipe could rack up millions of views within hours, Green Bean Casserole spread the way truly good dishes do. A neighbor made it and passed it along. A church friend shared it on handwritten index cards. It showed up on kitchen counters clipped from newspapers and tucked into envelopes mailed across states. Campbell’s printed it on millions of soup cans, turning it into one of the first recipes America learned together.

 It traveled because it worked. It tasted good every time. And it never asked much of the cook. A handful of ingredients, one baking dish…and the assurance that dinner would land well. Its reliability became its signature. There is a quiet grace in that kind of simplicity.

Cooks of all kinds now make it their own. South Asian families fold in toasted mustard seeds and coconut milk. Mexican-American cooks add fire-roasted poblanos and cotija. Italian-American homes shower it with Parmigiano-Reggiano. Southerners slip in crispy bits of bacon. Vegan cooks rebuild the base from cashew cream or oat milk and gluten-free cooks thicken the sauce with 1:1 blends and starch. The versions change, yet the structure holds. It’s always a canvas, never a constraint. This adaptability, its willingness to evolve without losing its identity is part of why it has endured for seven decades.

Before green bean casserole became a national touchstone, it began at an ordinary desk in a modest test kitchen. Dorcas Reilly started working in the 1950s as a home economist at The Campbell Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey, during a time when the future of American home cooking came from women who understood the real landscape of family life. They didn’t assume abundance. They built dinner from what was already there. Their innovation wasn’t loud. It was steady, thoughtful and humble.

“Green Bean Casserole represents America’s history of home economists creating new dishes the way musicians write pop songs,” adds Kim. “They are simple, memorable, meant to be held by many.”

It reframes what Dorcas was truly doing in that Camden kitchen. She wasn’t only testing a recipe. She was shaping something America would carry. She was answering to the realities of American kitchens and in the process creating a tradition.

Dorcas never set out to create something iconic. She aimed to answer a simple question:  what can a family make with what they have on hand? She tested the recipe nearly 100 times before landing on six familiar ingredients from the pantry of 1955 – cans of green beans and cream of mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, black pepper and packaged fried onions – and created something straightforward and good. Good enough to trust. Good enough to repeat. Good enough to weave into the rhythm of American life.

Sitting with Tom Reilly, Dorcas’ widower, in the New Jersey living room he and Dorcas shared for more than 60 years brought the story into focus. He recalled a trip they made to Peoria, Illinois, then the epicenter of Green Bean Casserole requests, where Dorcas did a live demonstration at a local TV station. When she returned to the hotel, she was distraught because she had forgotten to mention the milk. “She was so embarrassed,” Reilly said. “That was Dorcas. Even after millions of people made her recipe, she still worried about getting every detail right.”

Her legacy was never about attention. It was about care – for the cook, for the eater, for the everyday realities of family life. That spirit lives on through her niece, Eve Bates-Stoklosa, who understood exactly what Dorcas had given America. Eve created the Bates-Stoklosa Family Legacy Fund – Trailblazer Research Grant through Phi Upsilon Omicron, the national honor society for family and consumer sciences, to carry that work into the future.

“My Aunt Dorcas was small in stature, but grand in her culinary contributions,” Eve explained. “Her quiet innovations shaped the ways millions of families ate. I created the Bates-Stoklosa Family Legacy Fund – Trailblazer Research Grant to ensure her legacy lives on by supporting the next generation of culinary innovators just like Dorcas.”

Dorcas’ story, like her recipe, continues to nourish. It feeds the next wave of cooks, researchers and storytellers who believe in the power of simple food done with care.

The 70th anniversary of Green Bean Casserole arrives at a time when America is grappling with connection, identity and the rituals that have held us together. Families are stretched across states. Busy lives and contradicting beliefs tear on us. Yet this simple dish continues to show up each year with a steady wisdom that beckons…come together. Green Bean Casserole doesn’t ask you to perform. It asks you to come as you are.

That generosity, and the dish’s endurance, inspired the Green Bean Casserole for Good campaign. Created to celebrate 70 years of impact and to support the Trailblazer Research Grant, the campaign invites households to join a movement:  buy the T-shirts, make the casserole, and share your stories on social media throughout the holiday season. Proceeds from the Green Bean Casserole for Good T-shirt, available for purchase at www.chadwickboydlifestyle.com/shop, help fund the grant.

And here we are, decades after Dorcas first pulled that casserole from the oven, still gathering around it. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Sons and daughters. Kids who take their first bite and instantly understand why it matters. The dish arrives and the room changes. Not because the ingredients are grand, but because the feeling is.

A recipe that lasts this long tells us something essential. Not only about who created it, but about who we are and who we hope to keep becoming. Dorcas didn’t just give America a dish. She gave us a ritual, one that pulls us back to one another every year, with the quiet promise that there will always be a place at the table.