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Pumpkin Soup (Zuppa di Zucca)
1 slice of pumpkin 2 tablespoons of butter 1 tablespoon of sugar 1/2 cup of water 1 1/2 cups of milk Peel the pumpkin and remove the seeds, cut into small pieces, and put into a saucepan with the butter, the sugar, a pinch of salt, and the water. Boil for two hours, then drain and put back into the saucepan with the milk, which has been boiled. Allow it to come to a boil, and then serve it with squares of fried bread.
A very plain milk-and-pumpkin soup of the kind Italian home cooks made from a wedge of the enormous field pumpkins sold cut at market. The recipe's two great vaguenesses are the quantity of pumpkin and the cooking time, and both need addressing.
- "1 slice of pumpkin"This assumes a large pumpkin sold by the cut piece, and gives no weight. Roughly 2 lb of peeled, seeded flesh suits the half cup of water and cup and a half of milk here; more than that and the soup will be a purée rather than a soup.
- Use a cooking pumpkinCarving pumpkins are watery and bland. A sugar pumpkin, or the dense-fleshed zucca types sold in Italian markets, will do what the recipe expects. Butternut squash is the closest reliable supermarket substitute.
- Two hours is far too longCubed pumpkin in a covered pan collapses in 20 to 30 minutes. A long boil may have suited the low, uneven heat of an older range; on a modern burner the pan is likely to scorch well before the time is up.
- Don't throw away the cooking liquid"Drain" here means to pour off the loose water so the milk is not thinned, not to discard flavour. Keep it, and add a little back if the finished soup is too thick.
- Mash or blendThe original leaves the pumpkin in pieces. Passing it through a food mill or blending it briefly before the milk goes in gives the smooth texture this style of soup is usually served with today.
- Scalded milkBoiling the milk separately before adding it was standard in older recipes, and is often explained as a precaution from the days of unpasteurised supply. It is no longer necessary, but warming the milk first still keeps the soup from taking a long time to come back up to heat.
- The sugarA tablespoon is a seasoning, not a dessert measure — it lifts the squash the way a pinch of salt does. Taste before adding all of it, since many modern squash varieties are sweeter than field pumpkin.
- Yield and the fried breadThe quantities suggest roughly four small servings as a first course. The fried bread is day-old bread cut in small squares and fried in butter or oil until crisp; add it at the table so it does not soften.
Pumpkin — zucca — arrived in Italy from the Americas in the sixteenth century and took hold most firmly in the north, above all in Lombardy, Emilia and the Veneto, where it still fills tortelli and risotti. Soups like this one belong to the frugal end of that tradition: a wedge of squash, a little butter, whatever milk the house had, and stale bread crisped in fat to give it body. A touch of sugar is often found in northern Italian pumpkin cookery, which has never treated the squash's sweetness as something to be hidden. Books of this sort, published in English in the early twentieth century, often leaned on simple regional dishes to argue that the cooking was economical as well as agreeable; the measurements frequently assume a market stall rather than a scale.