Green Bean Casserole
Green Bean Casserole consisting of just six ingredients: a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, black pepper, green beans and crunchy fried onions. The retro recipe, which has been appearing on American tables for more than 60 years, can be traced back to a woman named Dorcas Reilly, who died on October 15 at the age of 92.
Dorcas, who had earned a degree in home economics from Drexel University (known then as the Drexel Institute of Technology), got to tinkering. According to Today’s Vidya Rao, she and her team initially toyed with adding celery salt and ham to the recipe, but ultimately settled on six simple, affordable ingredients that could be stirred together in a casserole dish and popped into the oven for 25 minutes. The prep time was minimal; the dish worked well with frozen or canned green beans, and the fried onions were pre-packaged.
Green bean casserole has endured over the ages, with 40 percent of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup sales going towards making the dish, a spokesperson told Rao in 2015. You can find upgraded versions of the recipe (Bon Appétit, for instance, recommends ditching the canned soup for whole milk, cream and fresh cremini mushrooms) and Reilly’s hand-written original recipe card even made it into the archives of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/remembering-dorcas-reilly-inventor-green-bean-casserole-180970635/
Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits
There’s a scientific reason no one outside the South can nail them.
The one ingredient I took for granted had indeed been the key all along, says Robert Dixon Phillips, a retired professor of food science at the University of Georgia. To make a good biscuit, “you want a flour made from a soft wheat,” he says. “It has less gluten protein and the gluten is weaker, which allows the chemical leavening—the baking powder—to generate carbon dioxide and make it rise up in the oven.” It turns out that in most of the U.S., commonly available flours are made from hard wheats, which serve a different purpose. “Hard wheats are higher in gluten protein, and when they’re turned into a dough, the dough is very strong and elastic and can trap carbon dioxide,” says Phillips. If you want to make bread, you want a hard wheat. Northern biscuits suck because they are made with bread flour.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/11/better-biscuits-south-thanksgiving/576526/