It doesn’t matter whether you grew up in the Midwest or on the coasts, in a suburban kitchen or a city apartment if you’ve been to an American Thanksgiving dinner sometime in the last 70 years, you’ve probably encountered green bean casserole. There it sits, often in a 9×13 dish that’s seen decades of holidays, its surface bubbling, its fried onion topping golden and curling at the edges. It’s not glamorous. It’s not fancy. And yet, year after year, it returns to the table like a favorite relative reliable, humble, and strangely essential. Green bean casserole occupies a strange and beautiful corner of Thanksgiving tradition. It’s not seasonal in the way cranberry sauce is. It’s not historical like the turkey. It’s not made from scratch with farmer’s market ingredients. In fact, its roots are in 1950s convenience cooking, born not in a family kitchen, but in a test kitchen at Campbell’s Soup Company. In 1955, a home economist named Dorcas Reilly was tasked with creating a simple vegetable side dish that used common pantry ingredients. She took canned green beans, condensed cream of mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, black pepper, and the now-iconic French’s fried onions and the rest is culinary history. It wasn’t trying to be elegant. It wasn’t meant to impress. It was meant to feed, to comfort, to please a crowd and it did exactly that.

Over the decades, green bean casserole took root in American kitchens not because it was trendy, but because it was easy, affordable, and satisfying. It didn’t require fresh ingredients or hours of labor. It could be assembled in minutes and slid into the oven alongside the turkey and stuffing. And, somehow, it was exactly what people wanted creamy, savory, just a little crispy, and always reliable. But what started as a convenience recipe has become something more a cultural heirloom, passed down from grandmothers to mothers to children, each family adding their own twist. Some now use fresh green beans, blanching them first to keep their color and crunch. Others make their own mushroom béchamel sauce from scratch. Some keep it classic, insisting that the canned beans and soup taste like home. The beauty of green bean casserole is that it belongs to everyone, and no two versions are exactly alike.

It’s also a dish that sneaks up on you. At first, you might pass it by for the more dramatic dishes turkey, sweet potatoes, stuffing. But then you take a spoonful maybe for balance, maybe out of nostalgia and suddenly, you’re reminded why it has never left the table. It’s creamy in a way that feels indulgent, comforting in a way that wraps around your memories. The texture contrast of crisp onions and tender green beans is oddly perfect. And somewhere deep in that first bite, you remember your grandmother’s kitchen, or your first Friendsgiving, or the smell of a warm oven on a cold morning in November. Green bean casserole doesn’t demand to be the favorite dish it simply insists on being present. It is the quiet center of the table. A whisper of the past. A dish that has, against all odds, become as iconic as the bird itself.

Here’s the classic recipe the one millions have relied on since 1955 with room for your own twists if you’re feeling adventurous.