Church potlucks couldn't be held without it. Holiday tables without it would have just bowls of naked green beans. I'm talking about that universal glue of casseroles everywhere, canned cream of mushroom soup.

When I decided to become a Real Cook, I banished cream of mushroom soup from my pantry. Not in MY food, not that last resort of people who can barely turn on an oven.

I even found the condensed mass, quivering in its can, to look pretty gross; thick and grayish-white with little black chunks of mushroomlike objects. It became, to me, a symbol of the no-brainer, assembly-line type of home cooking.

Growing up, my mother, despite her love affair with convenience foods, never used the stuff. She would not eat mushrooms, even the alleged ones dotting the goo. And, as we all know, if Mama doesn't eat it, nobody eats it because she won't cook it.

Now, she did enjoy throwing some cream of celery soup around. One favorite dish was frozen perch fillets ("It tastes just the same as flounder, but it's cheaper," she'd say) drenched in cream of celery soup, sprinkled with cheese and baked into a textureless greenish-white mass.

I brought The Can into our lives, after eating the infamous green bean casserole at a friend's house as a teenager. It was the perfect food: vegetables obscured by crunchy fried things and rolling in fat and salt. What teen wouldn't love it?

If you've never heard of the casserole, welcome to Planet Earth; was it a smooth flight from Jupiter? It's a can of green beans (French style or regular), a can of you-know-what and a can of fried onions sprinkled on the top, then baked. Some people mix in the onions. Or add slivered almonds, sliced water chestnuts, artichoke hearts, crushed crackers, Parmesan cheese, more mushrooms, soy sauce or many other things.

Among the many versions are some obvious attempts by Real Cooks to avoid The Can. And I'm embarrassed for them.

The Whole Foods Market Web site offers a Natural Green Bean Casserole containing organic cream of mushroom soup, fresh green beans and homemade onion rings. The site says : "This natural recipe doesn't attempt to replicate the old version; the new flavor surpasses the old instead."

Isn't a "natural" version of this casserole like "natural" Naugahyde? If the flavor is what you remember, that's what you want.

The topper was a recipe from Emeril Lagasse on The Food Network Web site. His Emerilized Green Bean Casserole requires that one prepare one's own cream of wild mushroom soup to use in it. Yeah, right. I believe he has been inhaling too much cayenne.

The attempts to upgrade the casserole, bizarre as they might be, attest to the long-lasting popularity of it and its crucial, creamy ingredient.

John Faulkner, director of brand communications at Campbell's Soup, says that The Can is the company's third most popular soup, after chicken noodle and tomato. Nobody eats it heated in a bowl. So that means there's a whole lot of casserolin' going on out there, despite changes in the way people cook and eat over the decades since The Can was introduced in 1934.

A lot of it goes into classic tuna casseroles, too. This was something else we never had in my house, because "that tuna smells like cat food," according to my mother. Faulkner says there is a "seasonality" to the dish, and Campbell's has done a lot of casserole tracking.

"Looking at recent data for percentage of total casseroles consumed by month and tuna casseroles consumed by month, it's interesting to see that after school begins in the fall, both total and tuna casserole consumption climb in September. At the holidays, tuna declines, but the total, driven by green bean casserole, climbs," he says. "In the spring, Lent and Easter drive casserole consumption, in particular tuna casserole, so March and April are huge months for tuna casseroles."

No one gives up The Can for Lent, evidently.

As far back as 1916, people have been using canned soups in recipes, particularly as substitutes for sauces. My 1975 edition of "The Joy of Cooking" contains about a half page on using canned soups in sauces.

The newest edition of the cookbook, which was revamped in 1997, bears no trace of The Can. Its Tuna Noodle Casserole recipe includes instructions for an easy cheese sauce.

To use leftover Thanksgiving turkey one year, I made Turkey Tetrazzini with a sauce from scratch. Then, ready to have my disdain confirmed, I cooked another batch with cream of mushroom soup. Both were good. One was a whole lot easier and quicker.

Is it preferable to use fresh ingredients because they're more healthful and just taste better? Yes. Is it a good idea to save the fat, calories and salt found in prepared foods, like canned soup, for things you really enjoy (like buttered popcorn)? Yes. Is it good to open your horizons in the kitchen, to learn more about food and feel more comfortable trying new things, rather than opening three or four cans and calling it a day? Yes.

But when the choice is between drive-through again or a sit-down meal with the family, The Can may have its place. And heaven knows, I don't want to get on the wrong side of those potluck-cooking church ladies.

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