National Green Bean Casserole Day Date in the current year: December 3, 2024

Green bean casserole is one of the most popular side dishes served on Thanksgiving and Christmas in the United States. Its primary ingredients are green beans, cream of mushroom soup, and crispy deep fried onions.

It might seem that green bean casserole has been around forever, but its recipe isn’t even a hundred years old. The history of the dish can be traced back to 1934, when the Campbell Soup Company began producing its canned cream of mushroom soup. It was the first Campbell’s soup that was marketed as a soup and a sauce. Soon housewives began use it as a casserole filler (a casserole using canned soup is called a hotdish; it originated in the Upper Midwestern United States).

Like other food companies, Campbell’s made recipes that called for their products a part of their marketing strategy and employed recipe developers. Green bean casserole was invented by one of Campbell’s recipe developers, Dorcas Reilly (née Bates) in 1955. She was tasked with creating a quick and easy dish made with ingredients that can be found in most American households.

The original name of the dish was “green bean bake”. Originally marketed as an everyday side dish, it became popular as a Thanksgiving dish in the 1960s, when Campbell’s started printing the recipe on the Cream of Mushroom Soup can labels. In many families, green been casserole is served for Christmas dinner as well.

The original green bean casserole recipe calls for six ingredients: green beans, cream of mushroom soup, milk, ground black pepper, soy sauce, and French fried onions. The first five ingredients are mixed together with a portion of onions, baked in a casserole dish, then topped with the rest of the onions and baked for a few more minutes. Some food historians suggest that it is crunchy onions that made a rather ordinary dish stand out.

Since the invention of the original recipe, many variations of the green bean casserole have been developed. Some use fresh mushrooms and cream sauce instead of canned soup, sautéed onions instead of French fried ones or broccoli/asparagus instead of green beans, and some incorporate additional ingredients like bacon or cheese.

National Green Bean Casserole Day was created by freelance writer and editor Jace Shoemaker-Galloway, who has been nicknamed the Queen of Holidays due to having written countless articles about holidays and even inventing a few holidays herself.

Shoemaker-Galloway wanted to celebrate an iconic holiday dish that is a constant at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. She chose the date of December 3 because it is just the right time to start planning your Christmas dinner and perfect your green bean casserole recipe if you’re not satisfied with how it turned out when you cooked it for your Thanksgiving feast. And even if you are perfectly satisfied, it won’t hurt to experiment with the recipe a little and make it even better.