I’m another one who’s only ever used it as a sauce for cooking.
I’ve heard people use it as actual soup… but… I don’t actually have any photographs or anything to prove it.
(BTW, all y’all fungus haters - if you’re down on fungus do you skip cheese, too?)
We mostly use it as a sauce in this household, though I’ve eaten it as a soup, too.
Am I the only one who mourns the old formula? They’ve remade the formula, so that now it’s “creamier”, or so they say. It doesn’t hold its shape as well when dumped from the can.
BTW, when making tuna casserole, use a can of cream of CELERY soup. For some reason, this just tastes better. Cream of celery is strictly a sauce in our household, not a soup.
I knew we connected on a deeply spiritual level… 
Anything I make that would normally use cream of mushroom soup is made with my own cream sauce and fresh mushrooms.
Campbell’s always struck me as way too salty.
I used to love Cream of Mushroom soup as a kid! Now I want to go buy a can and have some soup for lunch today.
It’s definitely traditional for Thanksgiving green-bean casserolle (which unfortunately, no one in my family makes), but it’s better as a soup than a sauce, IMO.
I can’t get behind Cream of Mushroom.
But Cream of Celery is nummy. Soup or sauce, I don’t care.
I’ve used it as both, and will probably continue to do so.
But what’s weird isn’t that there’s a “new” formula, like Lynn points out; it’s that there are different formulations in different parts of the continent!
Cream of Mushroom in New York =! Cream of Mushroom in Canada
Sauce, people, sauce. It’s great over meatloaf. Open the can and place it in the oven during the last 15 minutes as the meatloaf is baking. It’ll be sufficiently warmed and runny enough to use to glop, yes glop, over the meatloaf slices. Had it once as a soup, bore the unmistakable taste and texture of wallpaper paste-don’t ask.
I’m afraid that I’m on the team that considers this stuff to be pretty nasty. Tasteless, over-salted glop with rubbery mushroom-like bits. It’s so easy to make the real thing that this stuff has no home here.
I can understand not liking cream of mushroom soup, but I can’t really understand disliking mushroom simply because it’s a fungus. I mean, look where penicillin came from and that’s really good for those of us who don’t have an allergy. And if it’s good and won’t make me ill, I’m not really too concerned from where it came from! It’s a plant, which should be more palatable than some creature’s organs. (And don’t get me wrong, I’m a meat-eater).
care to share your favorite recipe with someone so weak he is eating the topic while he types this? I love soup and I’ve started downloading recipes to try. I was surprised that most of the mushroom soups use chicken broth.
I use to eat a lot of Campbells soups when I was younger but they seem to be much saltier now. Never understood the need to over-salt something. It’s easy to add salt but impossible to remove.
As to the topic, I plead guilty to soup consumption.
I have some small argument against fungus because I am allergic to penicillin.
That’s not the reason I dislike mushrooms though. Mostly it’s because of the texture and “taste” (which to my tastebuds resembles that of the insole of a wet boot). Thinking about where mushrooms are known to grow doesn’t help either. I always envision a cow patty or some dark, dank forest crawling with termites and ants.
That said, I’m the only person in my entire extended family who doesn’t love them. The canned soup is, in my family, only a sauce.
He he… While my mother and other people I knew did occasionally make things using Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup as a sauce, I have only done so once that I can remember since I have my own household. The one time I did do it, my not-quite-husband announced that he really didn’t like mushrooms or “cream-of-anything” soup, so I haven’t done it since.
However, when I was growing up, my family also ate the stuff as soup, and I do still eat it as soup–usually for lunch, when hubby and I do our own thing for lunch–because I like mushrooms and I like lots of “cream-of-anything” soups. As a result, our daughter also knows it and eats it as soup.
A couple of weeks ago, though, while we were in the soup aisle of the grocery store, I pointed out to my daughter that a lot of people never ate the stuff as soup, and used it as sauce instead. Her response was “Ooo, Yuck!” and she promptly had a bowl of cream of mushroom soup when we got home.
We have tallied the results so far, and “Sauce” is winning by one vote. “Soup” and “Both” are tied with 10 votes each, and “Neither” is not far behind.
As for the different formulation, last time I bought the Publix generic brand I was delighted to find that it fell out of the can in one solid mass.
Well, if you’re going to keep score, I guess I’d better vote. Both.
On the side issues: tomato is mixed with milk (I can remember when DO NOT USE MILK was in the instructions, but my mother didn’t pay any better attention to instructions than I do), and tuna noodle casserole is better with cream of mushroom than with cream of celery.
Exchange egg noodles for the rice and you get something the cafeteria served when I was in grade school.
Ironically, I’ve never experienced this “green bean casserole” which everybody else seems to know and love. It sounds revolting.
I dislike Campbell’s soups in general. They have that nasty proceseed taste. The few times I have had Cream of Mushroom, however, it has been as a sauce. That was bad enough. I can’t imagine actually eating it by itself. I’ve never actually heard of anyone eating it as a soup.
I’d be interested to learn what Campbell’s knows about this subject. I’d bet they know exactly what percentage of cans get eaten as soup or as part of recipes, and exactly what percentage of consumers think of it as “soup,” “ingredient,” or "both.
Many of these are good variations (I didn’t like the sound of the first one, however).
Not really, but I thought I might be “winning”. 
Well, as someone who loves the fungus among us… Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup is better as a sauce and fairly awful as a soup. I’ve also never experienced the Green Bean casserole… it sounds fairly awful…
You say this like you think tripe is a good thing, thickened or unthickened. I just have to ask one thing about Tripe thickened with celery soup?? Does it smells like Tripey Celery or Celery Tripe? Actually don’t answer that.
I have never used a can of soup as a sauce for anything but this recipe I will avoid forever.