Baking Pumpkin Curry Soup
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
It is not hard to tell October is here when you live in farm country. Everything turns orange just in time for Halloween. It doesn’t matter what farmstead you visit, there is bound to be stacks of orange globes waiting to be carved into jack-o-lanterns and will probably never be consumed by humans except maybe in a store-bought pumpkin pie, whose main ingredient is probably more squash than pumpkin.
Barbara Kingsolver’s new book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A year of food life," has a laugh-out-loud chapter devoted almost entirely to this humble North American native. Barbara is a city girl who will probably be recognized by readers as the author of "The Poisonwood Bible," and other fiction pieces. In this non-fiction book, she returns to the farm and discovers all kinds of foods that don’t come cellophane wrapped in the supermarket and advocates a return to seasonal diets.
In her back-to-the-earth life, she has grown pumpkins and one October day decides to make soup for her family, using the hollowed out pumpkin as a tureen. Her local paper features a food section with a colorful two page spread under the headline "Pumpkin Possibilities," that includes a recipe for Pumpkin Curry Soup. "The food writer urged us to think past pie and really dig into this vitamin-rich vegetable," Barbara wrote. "I was excited. I was planning a special meal for a family gathering on the weekend."
She became quickly disillusioned when every single recipe started with the same ingredient: "1 can pumpkin."
"Come on people," Barbara wrote. "Doesn’t anybody remember how to take a big old knife, whack open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and bake it?" Not in our precooked, supermarket convenience society. Barbara was on her own and with the help of her father, she finally cut the head off the pumpkin, scooped out the innards and baked it. Her advice: "Cooking pumpkin from scratch may not be for the fainthearted."
She carefully prepared the pumpkin carcass for the oven and after baking it for an hour, she scraped out some of the softened flesh that would become part of the soup to be served in Barbara’s fancy tureen. After the soup was made, she said, "I set our regal centerpiece on the table." Then the clever soup tureen went limp.
"The whole thing collapsed. Fortunately, I’d baked it in a big crockery pie dish. We saved the tablecloth and nine-tenths of the soup." Her final word is that "we made a fine feast of our battered centerpiece, but confesses that she flunked the cooking school admonition that presentation is everything. She called the pumpkin the caboose of the garden train and declares it is much better when baked by the cook rather than taken out of any 16 ounce can from the supermarket.
If you’d like to make pumpkin curry soup (without using nature’s tureen) here’s a recipe I call simply Pumpkin Soup and I like it:
1/2 cup onion
3 tbsp butter
2 cups mashed cooked pumpkin
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground pepper
3 cups chicken broth (you can use vegetable broth)
1/2 cup half and half, or fat free half and half
Chop the onions and gently brown with butter in a pan. Put mashed pumpkin with onions in a pan. Add salt, sugar, nutmeg and pepper. Slowly add broth and heat thoroughly, but do not boil. To serve, pour into a tureen and add cream. Makes 4 to 6 small servings.
I confess, I have never tried to serve the soup in an actual pumpkin shell and after reading Barbara’s experience don’t think I will, but baked pumpkin is delicious and shouldn’t end up smashed in the road after Halloween.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)