A Lesson in Advertising From Your Grandma’s Deceptively Savvy ‘Ad Cookbooks’
There’s a simple reason we all eat green bean casserole even though no one likes it
By Madeleine Morley
Perhaps you’ve heard of Green Bean Casserole, the “homemade,” Pyrex-bound amalgamation of canned green beans, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, and fried onions. On Thanksgiving, 30 million homes across America serve the dish. Yet despite its status as a Midwest holiday staple, the casserole actually originated in a test kitchen in New Jersey. In 1955, Dorcas Reilly, a home economist at Campbell’s Soup Co. concocted the recipe to show American families that Campbell’s products could be used for more than just soup. Today, the recipe accounts for 70% of Campell’s website traffic.
In the mid-50s, however, the recipe was disseminated in cheap advertorial cookbooks that were slipped into women’s magazines or sent through the mail. Without these advertising cookbooks, which were produced not just by Campbell’s but by nearly all mainstream food brands at the time, we wouldn’t have gloriously shaped aspics, or Jell-O salads filled with marshmallows and nuts, or “Hawaiian” (a.k.a. Spam and pineapple) pizza. Instead of family recipes passed down through the generations, these eccentric mid-century meals are actually…
