Green bean casserole

rosemary
4 days ago
5 min read

"The word “gloopy” comes to mind" Alison Roman

This is in no way 'gloopy' looking but I'm starting with Ottolenghi's Blistered green bean casserole with parmesan and rosemary because this was my starting point - a recipe in Ottolenghi's newsletter, which was sort of about Thanksgiving, one American festival that I don't think will make it to our shores because it's specific to a historical American event. I also saw that this looked like a really good thing to try some day with green beans. I love green beans but I tend not to experiment much with them, tending to just go the French butter and garlic route. So a new recipe for them is always a tempting thing. And for some reason Woolworths always seems to have green beans at a good price. And there are always frozen ones too.

Apparently, along with all those sickly sweet things like pumpkin pie and marshmallows for Thanksgiving, green bean casserole is a must have. But it's not a thing that came with the first settlers in America - or the indigenous peoples or later immigrants come to that. No - this like the homity pie I wrote about earlier in the week - is a mid twentieth century thing from an Industrial giant - Campbells.

It was invented in 1955 by a lady called Dorcas Reilly who was a senior person in the Campbell's Test Kitchen. She had been given an assignment to create something for a feature article for the Associated Press - a quick and easy dish using ingredients most US households kept on hand. It wasn't even a success at first and the recipe changed a bit, before it was published on cans of Campbells condensed mushroom soup a few years later at which point it was adopted by the American housewife with enthusiasm.

So why Campbells? Well that's because the condensed mushroom soup was the sauce for the beans. You can find the Original recipe on their website. And this is the orginal recipe test card that Dorcas Reilly used - now in the National Inventors Hall of Fame Archives. It somewhat surprisingly includes soy sauce for an umami hit - Worcestershire sauce too and fresh green beans.

Mind you this is often a truly 'out of a tin and a packet' dish as, would you believe, some still use canned green beans. I found at least one recipe that did that on the All Recipes website. And even some serious cooks recommended that you use French's fried onions. Below is Campbell's version. I gather there is one other subtle change here, in that 'traditionally' the onions are arranged around the edge.

"For years, there were precise guidelines around the food styling of Green Bean Casserole and how it was photographed. The French-fried onions had to appear only around the edges of the casserole, not in the center. That’s changed in the past decade, so feel free to sprinkle them all over!" Campbells

Fundamentally you cook your green beans in the mushroom soup - some say celery - plus some milk, soy sauce and Worcester sauce, and when it's all bubbling and hot, top with those crispy onions - which culinary historian Lauren Shapiro apparently said was a 'touch of genius'. And indeed it may well be - that and the fact that it's a super easy side dish to make on a day when most housewives would be battling with turkey and mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with maple syrup and bacon, pumpkin pie - and those marshmallows come in somewhere. Campbells go so far as to say they estimate that 40% of their sales of canned mushroom soup go into the green bean casserole for Thanksgiving.

Having been tempted by Ottolenghi's version which quite apart from the very unconventional blistered beans, has much less sauce - a béchamel, in which you will also find turmeric, mustard, Parmesan, cream and stock, but not a mushroom to be seen, I turned to Deb Perelman who did have the mushrooms, in her Green bean casserole with crispy onions but cooked them in similarly creamy sauce, but somewhat more conventionally - garlic being the most untraditional item.

Along the way to finding her recipe and which I had vaguely remembered, I first found her Green beans with almond pesto which is irrelevant really because it's not at all the same thing, but it allows me to digress to a quote from her, which referred to a photograph she had seen on one of Ottolenghi's Instagram posts, of 'a pile of beans' in one of his delis:

"I had no idea how he made these or what recipe of his this might be but (I mean this warmly) I also didn’t care. I knew what I wanted them to taste like, the photo had me dreaming of a nutty and loud sauce that clung to every string of bean — and made it so, dusting off the almond pesto from the cookbook and applying it to a rainbow of beans, cooked until just crisp-tender."

Which was just how I felt about the other recipe in his newsletter - Roasted celeriac with walnut oil and dill, which is behind a pay wall. There were a couple of helpful photographs, but no recipe. I'm not sure that I could translate what I saw into an actual dish as well as Deb Perelman however. Below - Ottolenghi's 'pile of beans'; her recipe with the pesto and Ottolenghi's roasted celeriac.

I continued my search for green bean casseroles both conventional and innovative - so first the traditional/conventional, although none of them used tinned beans or soup, but many did use French's fried onions, which are a McKenzies product, although I'm not sure you can get them here. You can get others however you, and you can always get fried shallots.

Green bean casserole - Nagi Maehashi of Recipe Tin Eats who seems to think that here in Australia some of us celebrate Thanksgiving. Then there's The ultimate home-made green bean casserole from J. Kenji López-Alt/Serious Eats; Best-ever green bean casserole - Chris Morocco/Bon Appétit and Alison Roman's Green bean casserole which she avoids being gloopy by sautéeing the mushrooms and making less, but creamy sauce.

Then there are two from Jamie - both relatively traditional - the first Green bean casserole with a topping of pangritata rather than onions, and the second Green bean casserole with crispy fried onions sticking closer to the original. Rachel Roddy also has breadcrumbs for her Green beans in soured cream, but then she is not pretending at all to have anything to do with Thanksgiving, and there are no mushrooms and finally Hetty McKinnon, like Ottolenghi strikes out by adding tahini and lentils to her Green bean tahini casserole with lentils and crispy turmeric shallots

I think the crispy onions are essential, and probably the mushrooms too, but sautéeing the beans to a greater or lesser degree, and lessening the amount of sauce are definitely a very good way of lifting it all to a higher level.

We won't be celebrating Thanksgiving here either but I might make one or other of them some time - next time when I have beans that need using. It happens more often than you might think.