Brilliant beans

We really don't know much about early Thanksgiving dinners. There's even some question about whether turkey was actually on the menu when the Pilgrims sat down with Native Americans in 1621 to celebrate the harvest.

But one iconic Thanksgiving dish was surely not served at that first Thanksgiving meal -- green-bean casserole, a concoction that for many is as emblematic of the holiday as cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie or even the turkey.

Granted, the colonists probably had access to green beans, which radiocarbon dating of seeds found in Mexico reveals have been growing in this hemisphere for thousands of years. However, accounts of early Thanksgiving menus never specifically list green beans among the offerings. More to the point, the Pilgrims obviously knew nothing of canned cream of mushroom soup, a principal ingredient of the green-bean casserole, which was, after all, created by the Campbell Soup Company as a sales tool.

The gambit appears to have worked. The recipe for green-bean casserole is the most requested recipe ever devised by the company in its nearly 150-year history. Moreover, some 40 percent of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup sold is used as an ingredient in the dish, helping to make the soup the third most popular in the Campbell collection and netting the manufacturer some $20 million in cream of mushroom soup sales during the holidays alone.

It all started back in 1955, in the days before Martha Stewart, when convenience foods, out of which the green bean casserole is built, were becoming fashionable. (Martha, by the way, has her own recipe for the casserole which, typically, requires everything, including even the French fried onions that go on top, to be made from scratch -- more of an inconvenience food than a convenience one.)

Nearly half of all cans of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup sold are used as an ingredient in green bean casserole, an iconic holiday dish invented by the soup company to spur sales. (TOM HARTE)

Back then Dorcas Reilly was working as a recipe supervisor in the Creative Food Center at Campbell's, not your average soup kitchen. Part of her duties involved traveling to New York City every week to prepare the food for Campbell's television commercials, aired live, during the Henry Aldrich Show on NBC, for which the soup company was the sponsor.

But it was her other responsibility, concocting new dishes using the company's products, that would eventually lead to her making her mark on the Thanksgiving holiday. Cecily Brownstone, the food editor of the Associated Press at the time, came to Campbell's for help. She had recently dined at the home of John Snively, a prosperous citrus rancher in Florida, and wanted to re-create some of the dishes served there, especially a green bean dish which had been served to Queen Soraya of Iran when she had visited the ranch, eliciting rave reviews from her.

Reilly quickly got to work and, as they say, the rest is history. Today her original but now yellowed recipe card for what she initially called green-bean bake is housed at the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, not far from Edison's first light bulb and other innovations which, like hers, have made epic contributions to humankind.

Green Bean and Pimento Cheese Casserole

There's nothing wrong with the original version of the green-bean casserole, but, after nearly 60 years, you might want to tinker with it to make it more distinctive, as in this recipe, inspired by one on the Pioneer Woman website. It's no more difficult than the original because instead of opening a can of condensed soup you instead simply open a container of packaged pimento cheese spread.

Green beans cooked with onion and bacon and tossed with pimento cheese are ready to be topped with bread crumbs and French fried onion rings in this new take on the traditional holiday casserole dish. (TOM HARTE)

• 2 pounds haricots verts
• 4 slices bacon, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 24 ounces prepared pimento cheese spread
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1/8 teaspoon Cayenne pepper
• 1 cup Panko bread crumbs
• 1 cup French fried onions

Blanch green beans for 3-4 minutes and drain. Cook bacon over medium heat for 2 minutes. Add onion and garlic and continue cooking until bacon is done but not crisp and onions are golden. Add green beans. Combine pimento cheese and cream and stir until smooth. Add Cayenne pepper. Pour over green bean mixture and toss to coat. Place in greased 2-quart baking dish, top with Panko crumbs and fried onions and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until sauce is bubbling.