It should be a matter of concern for all of us this Thanksgiving season that the lady who invented the green bean casserole has died and there is financial turbulence in the Campbell’s Soup empire.
My mother stuck to traditions when it came to Thanksgiving dinners, and these new developments could drive American families even further than they have already drifted from those customs.
At our house when I was growing up, there was baked turkey, cornbread dressing, candied sweet potatoes, green bean casserole and giblet gravy every Thanksgiving.
To be honest, a turkey was cooked just to continue that ritual. My mother always baked a big hen, because all of us liked chicken better than turkey. But she did a turkey anyway for visiting kinfolks.
I never really liked the green bean casserole. To me, green beans are good by themselves, but the flavor of the beans gets covered up by the mushroom soup, soy sauce and other casserole ingredients.
That’s not to say that I didn’t always get a big helping of the casserole. Those canned French-fried onions on top were good, and I just picked them off and ate them.
In fact, there were a couple of times when my brother and I got into the can of fried onions while my mother was cooking the Thanksgiving dinner, and she had to do her casserole without them.This attention to green bean casseroles is important because Dorcas Reilly, who invented that recipe for the Campbell’s Soup company back in 1955, died a few weeks ago.
With her gone now, some of these non-traditional chefs and cookbook editors might start tampering again with the recipe. The Good Housekeeping cookbook has already replaced the cream of mushroom soup in the recipe with sour cream.
That is a problem for the Campbell’s company, which estimates that 40 percent of the cream of mushroom soup it sells in this country goes into green bean casseroles.
Campbell’s does not need any more distractions. An investor has been trying to unseat the board of directors of the company that has been controlled by the same family since 1869.
That news would upset my mother, who used the company’s soup at Thanksgiving not only in her green bean casserole but also in the giblet gravy that we poured over the dressing.
It didn’t have to be Thanksgiving for her to open a can of Campbell’s Soup. If we had a cold or sore throat, we got chicken noodle soup doused with black pepper.
Regina and I like the tradition handed down to us by our mothers of big Thanksgiving dinners built around the staples of turkey and dressing and the usual trimmings.
But we are guilty ourselves of some revisions in the holiday feasts that would probably not meet with the approval of my mother or hers.
For one thing, we don’t use that canned, jelly-like cranberry sauce that always jiggled on a separate plate at Thanksgiving dinners at our house. Regina makes her own sauce out of fresh cranberries.
Our mothers would never have made dressing with anything but homemade cornbread. We use Martha White’s cornbread mix and can’t tell the difference once the cornbread is stirred in with the onions, celery and bell pepper.
Most important, we don’t put giblets in our giblet gravy. We do use the drippings from chicken or turkey and some cream of chicken soup, but we avoid livers, gizzards and thing like that.
Like my mother, I would rather have baked chicken than turkey. We still observe the tradition of having turkey at Thanksgiving, but our parents probably wouldn’t recognize it.
We smoke turkeys on the grill, fry them whole in crawfish pots and even order them from smokehouse places already cooked and ready to eat. My mother would be flabbergasted.
She would also be disappointed that Regina and I have never in all our years of marriage put a green bean casserole on the table at Thanksgiving or any other time.
I apologize to my mother and to the lady who created the green bean casserole and died last month, but Regina and I just don’t like mushroom soup mixed in with our green beans.
It would be comforting to my mother to know that we will have the candied sweet potatoes that she loved so much again this Thanksgiving and will put even more butter and sugar in them than she called for in her recipe.