Lisa has explained to me that no authentic Polish Easter table is complete without a green bean casserole. I have no basis to dispute her contention, so I dutifully prepared this traditional holiday dish.

There are those who claim that the green bean casserole was first created in the Campbell's Soup test kitchens in 1955. I can only assume, given Lisa's insistence on the dish's inclusion in our Easter dinner, that this attribution is a lie spun by power brokers of the McCarthy Era in an effort to marginalize the national achievements of a Soviet Bloc puppet state. Campbell's, I surmise, is either: (a) the arm of the military-industrial complex charged with perpetuating this propaganda; or (b) a stooge of the Unamerican Activities Committee which -- having built fifty years of goodwill on a lie -- cannot even today admit the truth.

My own theory is that the green bean casserole was actually invented by Sigismund Augustus, the legendary king of Poland and Lithuania, who helped spread Renaissance thought and culture among the Slavic Peoples from the Carpathians to the Baltic Sea.