Zuppa di Zucca Gialla {Winter Squash Soup}

Photo by Maren Caruso from Williams-Sonoma Rustic Italian (Weldon Owen)

I resisted including a recipe for winter squash soup in The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy. It seemed to me that there were already more than enough to go around, and one of my aims for the book was to shine a light on lesser known recipes, such as Minestra di Ceci e di Castagne (Chickpea and Chestnut Soup) and Zuppa al Vino Bianco (White Wine Soup).

Also, winter squash soup didn’t strike me as particularly Italian.

On this last point I was wrong, and I eventually realized that my erroneous impression came from the fact that most of the time I had spent in Italy growing up was in summer, when, of course, winter squash is not in season. None other than Pellegrino Artusi, Italy’s revered 19th Century authority on gastronomy, included a recipe for Zuppa di Zucca Gialla (Yellow Squash Soup) in his famous book, La Scienza in Cucina e L’Arte di Mangiar Bene. (My Italian mother owns a decades-old copy in Italian; I have an excellent translation by Kyle M. Phillips III, titled The Art of Eating Well (Random House, 1996).

Artusi’s recipe is as simple as they come: slices of winter squash simmered in broth until tender and then pressed through a sieve. The pulp is then added to broth that has been thickened with a roux; the creamy soup is ladled over croutons and served with grated Parmigiano cheese.

There are, as you know, countless other recipes for winter squash soup, mostly featuring butternut squash, in print and online. Still, at cooking demonstrations and book signings, people wanted to know whether my book contained a recipe—not everyone, but enough to make me second guess my decision to leave it out.

Why is winter squash soup so popular? I suppose the simplest answer is that it is good–creamy, and both sweet and savory, with a golden color that is in perfect synchronicity with the season. But it’s more than that, I suspect. There is something appealing about the familiarity of this soup; it requires no special technique or ingredient, which is a blessing at a time of year when chaos is always threatening to knock down the door.

Last year, when I was working on Williams-Sonoma Rustic Italian, I thought it would be a good idea to make amends for my previous omission. I wanted to make a soup that was simple, but different from Artusi’s and from other versions. I turned to one of my favorite workhorse vegetables—the carrot—which, when roasted and puréed together with squash, gave the soup an even more vibrant color and added its own earthy sweetness.

My original recipe in WS Rustic Italian calls for butternut squash, which has a fairly thin, easy-to-peel rind and can be cut into chunks for roasting without too much effort. But when I made the soup last week I used this beauty, which I found at my local farmers’ market:

It’s called a bon bon squash, and with good reason: its flesh, when roasted, is sweet sweet sweet. And smooth. It looks a bit like a cross between a buttercup squash (another squat, green winter squash that is a favorite of mine) and a turban squash. Its rind is tough, which makes it harder to peel than the ubiquitous butternut squash. However, instead of peeling and chunking it raw, you can simply cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, and roast it (cut-side-down) on a rimmed baking sheet until it is completely soft, then spoon out the flesh.

If you look closely at the image at the top of this post, you will see that the croutons that garnish the soup are not made of bread. They are pancetta croutons and they are every bit as delicious as they sound—fat little cubes of pancetta pan-fried until they are crispy. Pure, salty, spicy, piggy heaven. And oh so good scattered over the top of this sweet golden soup. I’ll be making this soup as a first course for Thanksgiving dinner. Won’t you join me?

Tagged as: comfort food, farmers' market, Italian, Italian cooking, recipes, soup, Thanksgiving, The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy