Every Friday morning, Bon Appétit senior staff writer Alex Beggs shares weekly highlights from the BA offices, from awesome new recipes to office drama to restaurant recs, with some weird (food!) stuff she saw on the internet thrown in. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get this letter before everyone else.

Alex Lau

A moment of silence

Rest in peace, dear Dorcas Reilly, inventor of the green bean casserole. Let’s toast a can of cream of mushroom soup in honor of the woman whose vision not only saw how a soup could bind a pot of green beans, but topped the whole thing with crunchy fried onions. Reilly worked in the Campbell’s test kitchen and loved cooking so much that after a full day of developing recipes, she’d go home and cook some more—a lot of soup, according to her husband. While our recipe gets a little bougie with homemade mushroom béchamel, the French’s fried onions on top stay true to the 1955 original. According to Campbell’s, over 20 million homes will serve green bean casserole on Thanksgiving, which is an incredible culinary legacy to leave, if you ask me.

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Boo

Severed plastic arms hung from the ceiling of Hunter House Hamburgers in Birmingham, Michigan, where I recently stopped in with my family for an early dinner of slider-sized cheeseburgers, root beer floats made with 6 inches of soft serve afloat a cup of Barq’s, tots, and very salty fries. Meaning perfectly salted. A zombie slouched over the ATM. On our drive home, we passed a house with a skeleton family arranged in a barbecue scene, with a plastic baby on a Weber grill, and my appreciation for Halloween decor has never been surpassed. Suddenly I’m craving some popcorn balls.