Green bean casserole creator says onions made dish iconic

Dorcas B. Reilly mixed and cooked and stirred and tested hundreds of recipes during the more than 25 years she worked as a home economist in the Creative Food Center for Campbell's Soup Co.
Every day, she and a handful of co-workers concocted new dishes, bringing them to the group to test on each other's taste buds. Some went back for more work. Some went to the trash.
One side dish Reilly created became a culinary cultural icon. In 1955, she reconstituted some Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, mixed in a can of green beans, stirred in some fried onions and poured it all into a casserole dish for baking.
Fifty five years later, it's difficult to remember a time when the green bean casserole wasn't a Thanksgiving staple. The creamy, crispy side dish became so iconic, Reilly's recipe card became a part of the collection at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio.
Not that Reilly knew of her success at the time. Now 84 and living near her two children and four grandchildren in Haddonfield, N.J., she says it took more than 20 years for her to get a sense that the dish she created and her co-workers honed had found a permanent place at the holiday table. In the mid-1970s, a Campbell's researcher found that the recipe was the most requested in company history.
That fact amazed her, but she could understand why. After all, green beans are a popular food item. It helped that green beans and soup were not expensive in 1955. The dish also didn't require a lot of preparation.
The key was the fried onions, she says. Crispy and sweet from the carmelization during frying, she added them to give the dish another texture. Back then, fried onions were a gourmet novelty.
"It upscaled the dish," Reilly says.
"It made the casserole much more attractive. If it had just been green beans and soup, it would have been flat and almost colorless. It elevated it into another category."
As she's done every year since creating it, she will make the casserole for her family's Thanksgiving meal the same classic way. Unless the test kitchen cook in her comes out.
"At one point years ago I put some carrots in with the green beans for some color," she says. "I haven't done that for a while, but now that you mention it. I might do that this Thanksgiving

Associated Press file photo