Roast Pumpkin Soup: or, Carrots can't be everything

Today, we are making more Delia recipes!

Roasted Pumpkin Soup with Melted Cheese 1 3-3½ pound whole pumpkin 1 tablespoon peanut oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 3 cups vegetable or chicken stock 2 cups minus 2 tablespoons whole milk 2 tbsp butter Nutmeg to taste 4 oz Swiss cheese (Gruyere or Fontina), cut into ¼-inch cubes (or any other cheese that melts well) 6 tbsp cream or creme fraiche Fresh parsley (dried will do in a pinch) Croutons Salt and pepper to taste Before beginning, take the cheese out of the refrigerator so it'll be at room temperature by the time you serve it. Heat oven to 475° (gas mark 9, 240°C). Cut the pumpkin in half from top to bottom (ie, from the stem to the blossom end). Quarter each section lengthwise (so you have eight pumpkin slices). Scoop out the seeds and string. Brush with oil, shake on salt and pepper to taste, place on a heavy baking sheet (thin ones will warp), and bake until fork-tender, 25-30 minutes. While the pumpkin bakes, melt the butter in a large pot over high heat. Cook the onion until it just begins to turn color. Reduce heat to low and cook, stirring occasionally, for around 20 minutes. When the pumpkin is done, remove from the oven and let cool. Then scoop the "meat" off the rind and add it to the pot. Add the milk and stock, then salt pepper and nutmeg to taste. Simmer for 15-20 minutes. Then blenderize the soup. (Unless you have a large blender, you'll want to do this in batches.) Leave the center cap of your blender lid open (or whatever sort of opening the blender has at the top to allow you to pour in things while it's running). For reasons I don't understand, when you turn a blender full of very hot liquid, it suddenly pressurizes enough to pop off the lid and splatter everywhere. Leaving the lid a little open prevents that, just like loosening the lid on a container of leftovers before putting it in the microwave. Pour the soup through a strainer to catch any stringy bits that the blender missed. At serving time, heat the soup to a very low barely-simmer. Stir in the cheese cubes until they's warmed through and barely starting to melt. You don't want to melt the cheese. This soup is so much better with the soft cheese floating through it. Ladle the soup into bowls (preferably warmed). Spoon a little cream into each one. Sprinkle with croutons and parsley. Delia Smith's Winter Collection, 1995

I've said this before, but I really love watching Delia Smith videos. She somehow manages to give very precise directions, but somehow comes off as calming instead of nitpicky. It is a rare skill, which I think is a big part of why her career has lasted so long. 

A lot of her ingredient lists involve things that are special-order items on this side of the Atlantic (even when there isn't an ill-advised trade war on), but this one looked easy to shop for. However, I didn't want to use a pumpkin. For one thing, you can't get a fresh pumpkin in midwinter without nicking someone's leftover porch decorations. Also, I didn't want to dull my knife by hacking through a raw squash. So instead, we're using... these!

To my surprise, our carrots actually took a little longer than a pumpkin would have. But they smelled unexpectedly good toward the end of their roasting time. To emphasize: Delia Smith is so good that she can make carrots enticing, and she didn't even use carrots in this recipe.

Moving away from carrots and onto happier ingredients, I doubled the onion in the recipe. It doesn't look like a lot because we halved the soup. But you can take my word that we are being wonderfully generous with the onions.

Here we get to the first reason to use an actual pumpkin instead of carrots. Had we used pumpkin, the rind would have been charred but the edible part would have been fine. Since we didn't follow the recipe, we had to cut the blackened underside off of each carrot before putting it in the pot. (The second reason to use pumpkin is that carrot soup just isn't as nice.)  

Now that the pot was fully loaded, we could get to the toppings. I had cut up some French bread to make our own croutons, and slid them in the oven under the carrots. You shouldn't make croutons at nearly 500 degrees, but I thought it preposterous to get out the toaster when the oven was already fiendishly hot. 

I'd love to say they came out perfect, and they were indeed just the right shade of golden on top. But when we flipped one over, they were a little well done. Fortunately, they weren't completely burnt. If you like dark toast, they'd be fine.

At this point, we only needed to simmer and wait. Unfortunately, I forgot to make extra croutons to snack on while the soup cooked. I've said this before, but I really like croutons. When I let myself buy them, I eat them right out of the box the way other people go through potato chips.

The carrots plumped up a bit, but they didn't look great.

The blender made things look worse. Had this soup got any more unsightly, I could have passed it off as a diet recipe.

I forgot that carrots tend to cook to a brighter color than pumpkins. Our "pumpkin" soup looked like a safety warning sign. Maybe that's another reason to follow the recipe and use pumpkin: no one wants their soup to look like melted crayons.

This reminds me: a lot of the bigger Crayola boxes have a color called "macaroni and cheese."

All right, so our soup is kind of ugly. But let's dress it up with everything the recipe calls for:

That looks so much nicer, doesn't it? I know sprinkling on dried parsley lacks the panache of garnishing with fresh, but it still adds a nice flavor.

This soup was sweeter than I thought it'd be. But then again, it had roasted carrots and half-caramelized onions, so should I be surprised? The nutmeg added a bit of a sausage-y overtone which I thought was really nice. And of course, the half-melted cheese interspersed throughout was amazing. I would have liked provolone better, but that's just because I really, really like provolone.

For the record, carrots make a perfect counterfeit pumpkin pie, but they do not make a similarly magical pumpkin soup. This was good enough to save the leftovers, but I won't use carrots for this again. If I can get my hands on an actual cooking pumpkin (and perhaps a Sawzall with food-grade blades) I will revisit this recipe.