A baked side dish of green beans bound in a cream-of-mushroom sauce and topped with crispy fried onions. It is one of the defining American holiday sides, served at Thanksgiving and Christmas across the country, assembled almost entirely from pantry staples. The beans go soft and savory in the moist bake while the fried onions on top brown and stay crisp.
The dish has a precisely documented origin: it was created in 1955 by Dorcas Reilly, a home economist in the Campbell Soup Company test kitchen in Camden, New Jersey, for an Associated Press feature, with the brief to use ingredients most American households already kept on hand. Built on Campbell's condensed Cream of Mushroom soup and topped with French's fried onions, it was first printed on soup cans under the name 'Green Bean Bake,' and Campbell's renamed it 'green bean casserole' in the 1960s when the recipe moved onto the can label. It became a Thanksgiving fixture that decade; Campbell's has called it the most popular recipe ever developed in its kitchens and estimates it appears on some 20 million American holiday tables each year.
Soft, savory green beans in a thick, mushroom-flecked cream sauce, salted and rounded by the soy sauce worked into the base. The contrast is all on top: the fried onions stay shatteringly crisp and oniony-sweet above the bubbling sauce, a crunchy lid over a soft, creamy interior. Served hot from the dish, it reads as warm, salty comfort food rather than anything sharp or bright.
The canned cream-of-mushroom soup is a pre-made, starch-thickened roux base: its flour and starch, already cooked into the cream, gelatinize further in the oven and bind the beans without a fresh roux. The beans soften and steam through in the moist, covered heat of the bake, their water loosening into the sauce. The fried onions are added on top so they sit above the steam line and stay dry and crisp; the dry oven heat browns them further by Maillard reaction, while a covered base keeps the sauce from drying out before the onions color.
Variations
The canonical version uses canned green beans, condensed cream of mushroom soup, and packaged fried onions; from-scratch versions blanch fresh green beans, build a real mushroom béchamel or sauté fresh mushrooms, and fry their own shallots or onions on top. Common additions include shredded cheddar, crumbled bacon, water chestnuts for crunch, or a splash of Worcestershire; some cooks swap in cream of celery or cream of chicken soup. The same template underlies the broader family of American canned-soup casseroles, such as tuna noodle casserole.
On the Palate
Where Green Bean Casserole sits in the American flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 6How it's made
6 steps · 15 min
- 18 min
Blanch or steam trimmed green beans until just tender, then drain well.
Watch outBlanch the beans just to tender and drain them well — leftover water thins the sauce and it never sets properly in the bake.
- 23 min
Stir together cream of mushroom soup, whole milk, soy sauce, and black pepper in a bowl.
- 34 min
Fold the green beans and about half the fried onions into the sauce until evenly coated.
- 43 min
Spread the mixture in a buttered baking dish and level the top.
- 525 min
Bake at 180°C (350°F) for about 25 minutes until hot and bubbling at the edges.
- 65 min
Scatter the remaining fried onions over the top and bake 5 minutes more until golden and crisp.
Watch outAdd the fried onions only for the last 5 minutes — put them in earlier and the steam turns them limp instead of golden and crisp.
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