Recipe
Pumpkin soup with chickpeas and rosemary croutons
Italians do not carve pumpkins. They eat them, in quantity, and find the alternative faintly wasteful.
The centre of Italian pumpkin cooking is Mantova, in Lombardy, where the speciality is tortelli di zucca: pasta parcels stuffed with pumpkin, parmigiano and two things that read like errors, namely crushed amaretti biscuits and mostarda, a syrupy candied fruit preserve laced with mustard oil. The result is sweet, savoury, bitter and hot all at once, and it is one of the strangest and best things in Italian cooking. It has been made in roughly that form since the Renaissance, when the Gonzaga court at Mantova was busy showing off.
The lesson the tortelli teach applies directly to a weeknight soup. Pumpkin is sweet, and sweetness on its own becomes boring in about four spoonfuls. It needs something pushing back. Most pumpkin soups fail for exactly this reason: they are pumpkin, cream and a hopeful sprig of something, which is a dessert that has wandered into the wrong course and is trying to brazen it out.
This one pushes back with rosemary, chilli, garlic and a genuinely rude amount of black pepper. It takes its body from chickpeas rather than cream, which also means it survives a fridge without splitting or forming a skin.
The croutons matter more than croutons usually do. They are the only crunch in a bowl that is otherwise entirely soft, and a soup with no texture in it is a soup you stop paying attention to halfway down.
They travel in a twist of foil, never in the soup itself, for reasons that should not need explaining.
- Prep 15 min
- Cook 30 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Cook the onion in 3 tbsp of the oil in a large pot with a pinch of salt until soft, then add the garlic, chilli and one sprig of rosemary for a minute.
10 min
- 2
Add the pumpkin and turn it in the oil, then pour in the stock. Simmer until the pumpkin gives with no resistance at all.
20 min
- 3
Add three quarters of the chickpeas and blend the pot smooth with a stick blender. Keep the rest of the chickpeas whole for texture and stir them in after.
4 min
- 4
Meanwhile toss the bread with the remaining oil, the leaves from the second rosemary sprig and salt, and bake at 200°C fan until crisp and gold, shaking once.
12 min
- 5
Season the soup hard. It will want far more salt and pepper than you expect, because sweetness swallows both.
2 min
- 6
Serve with the croutons scattered on at the last moment and a final grind of pepper.
1 min
Variations
A spoon of harissa or curry powder with the garlic. Coconut milk in place of 200 ml of stock. Roast the pumpkin at 220°C instead of simmering it, which takes longer and tastes considerably better. Crumbled amaretti on top is the Mantovan joke and it genuinely works. Crisp pancetta or fried sage instead of croutons. The soup thickens overnight; loosen with hot water.