Paula Wolfert’s Autumn Squash Soup

You’d think we Californians would have little call for soup.

Enter fog. When not suffering unseasonable ninety-degree heat, Northern California often shelters beneath thick layers of the stuff. Said fog is often accompanied by a uniquely bone-chilling damp. While not precisely cold, neither is it warm.  And indeed, as the evenings cool down into the fifties, soup is just the thing.

Autumn Squash Soup with Country Ham and Garlic Croutes is yet another gem from Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking Of Southwest France, occasioned here by two events: I had duck parts to make a broth. And the cooler weather welcomes this undeniably rich soup.

Having made this countless times, I can tell you it happily accepts substitutes. Yes, you can make it with pig–ham, prosciutto, or bacon–or leave it out. Although the soup calls for duck fat, you can use butter or olive oil, or combine the three fats in any ratio.  The cup of cream added at the very end can be reduced to a quarter cup and you’ll still have a divine result. If cream makes you shudder, half-and-half or milk work nicely, too. The worst possible outcome is a slightly bland soup, and even then, it’s still addictively delicious.

You’ll need a food processor, blender, or immersion blender to make this. (Lacking all these mechanical items, you could use a potato masher.) If you make any amount of soup, I urge you to invest in an immersion blender. As a person with extremely limited kitchen space and not much money, I give every kitchen purchase lengthy consideration. My immersion blender cost $50.00.  It came with a 1-cup food processor and a whisk attachment. It was money well spent. Okay, so you won’t use your immersion blender every day. But when you’ve got a boiling hot soup needing pureeing, nothing does the job better. Do you really want to pour hot soup into a blender or food processor?  Apart from not doing yourself bodily harm, there’s cleaning the food processor or blender parts. Immersion blenders are easy to clean: there’s only one piece to rinse off.  And if yours, like mine, arrives with a mini-food processor, so much the better.

So, this soup.  You can make it with any kind of squash except Delicata, which isn’t meaty enough.  That said, acorn, or even better, Red Kuri or Kabocha, have the best flavor. Butternut is nice but dull. I used it here and we agreed it lacked heft.

This recipe makes a lot of soup, and the cream element means freezing isn’t really an option. But even when I make it just for two if us, it gets eaten right up.  Make it on a Friday night to eat over the weekend, or make it on a Sunday to eat during the week. Do this when the weather forecast is grim. You’ll be glad you did.  It’s also terrific dinner party fare: it reheats well, meaning you won’t be sweating in the kitchen while your friends have all the fun. If said friends are vegetarians, this soup can happily go vegetarian or even vegan. Without the croutes–French for crouton–this you can also feed it to your friends who are on gluten-free diets.