Green bean casserole

American dish from the 1950s

Green bean casserole is an American baked dish consisting primarily of green beans, cream of mushroom soup, and french fried onions. It is a popular side dish for Thanksgiving dinners in the United States and has been described as iconic. The recipe was created in 1955 by Dorcas Reilly at the Campbell Soup Company. as of 2020, Campbell's estimated it was served in 20 million Thanksgiving dinners in the US each year and that 40% of the company's cream of mushroom soup sales go into a version of the dish.

Campbell's Cream of Mushroom flavored soup variety was created in 1955 and was the first of the company's soups to be marketed as a sauce as well as a soup. It became so widely used as casserole filler in recipes for the hotdish recipes popular in Minnesota that it was sometimes referred to as "Lutheran binder".

Dorcas Reilly (1926–2018) created the recipe in 1955 while working in the home economics department at the Campbell's Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey. The recipe was created for a feature article for the Associated Press; the requirement was for a quick and easy dish using ingredients most US households kept on hand. 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".

It was originally marketed as an everyday side dish but became popular for Thanksgiving dinners in the 1960s after Campbell's placed the recipe on the can's label. The 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. As of 2020 Campbell's estimated it was served in 20 million Thanksgiving dinners in the US each year. Folklorist Lucy Long in 2007 noted that its inclusion on Thanksgiving dinner tables crosses ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious differences. She also notes it is included in most popular American cookbooks, mentioned in the media regularly, and referred to a "classic", "traditional", and "a Thanksgiving standard".

In November of 2002, Reilly, representing Campbell's, donated the original recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio.