The green bean casserole, an iconic Thanksgiving side dish with a N.J. connection, turns 70 this year

In 1955, Dorcas Bates Reilly of Haddonfield was tinkering with her team in the home economics department at the Campbell Soup Co., trying to recreate a casserole recipe that a manager had tasted somewhere. The team had been tasked with using ingredients most American families would already have on hand.

After a series of experiments, documented on a typed recipe card that is now part of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Reilly, who was 29 at the time, hit upon the six-ingredient winner.

Now known as green bean casserole, the dish that has become a Thanksgiving icon turns 70 this year.

The “Green Bean Bake,” as it was called at the time, mainly relied on green beans and Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup, along with a splash of milk, soy sauce, and black pepper. Crispy fried onions topped it off.

“It was such a rewarding feeling when your recipe was published,” Reilly told Drexel University’s alumni spotlight when she visited the campus years later. She had graduated from Drexel’s Home Economics program in 1947.

She never knew her careful experimentation (“onions too salty, beans lack freshness, too many onions,” she wrote in an early version of the recipe) would become a national star.

“How would she know of the thousands of recipes she worked on over all those years that there was one that stood out?” Reilly’s daughter, Dorcas R. Tarbell, 64, asked.

Before settling on the final ingredients, Reilly had played around with adding Worcestershire and slices of ham. Campbell’s began printing Reilly’s recipe on the back of its cream of mushroom soup can labels in 1960.

Tarbell said her mother had not known how popular the dish was until 1995, 40 years after its creation.

That was when Campbell’s marketing team studied sales data and found that cream of mushroom soup sales spiked in October and November, and dropped in January. They told Reilly that her recipe was the company’s most-requested ever.

After that, Reilly became “the ambassador of the green bean casserole,” Tarbell said. Each year, she talked to radio stations and newspapers, and traveled to stockholder meetings to talk about the dish.

Reilly died in 2018 and was celebrated in obituaries across the country as the “grandmother of the green bean casserole.”

This year, to celebrate the anniversary of her mother’s famous dish, Tarbell ordered an enormous, custom-made, inflatable green bean casserole to bedeck the lawn of her 99-year-old father and Reilly’s widower, Thomas H. Reilly.

“I thought, what better gift can I give than to honor the love of his life through the green bean casserole?” Tarbell, who lives down the street, said. “At this point, you have to have humor in life.”

In a town full of yards featuring inflatable Thanksgiving turkeys and pilgrims (and a few early Santas and snowmen), the six-foot side dish stands out.

Also in honor of the 70th anniversary, Reilly’s niece, Evelynne Bates Stoklosa, who is 80, established a research grant in honor of her aunt through Phi Upsilon Omicron, a national honor society for the Family and Consumer Sciences, the modern name for home economics. The research focus for the next two years will be “areas representing culinary arts, food science, nutrition, and dietetics.”

As for her mother’s dish — which is especially popular in the Midwest — it will likely appear on more than half of Thanksgiving tables nationwide this week, Campbell said.

Growing up, Tarbell said the family never ate green bean casserole. But after they realized Reilly had created a star dish, the family embraced it.

“Of course, we have green bean casserole at Thanksgiving,” Tarbell said, adding, “We have it at Christmas. We have it at Easter.”