Roasted Cinderella Pumpkin Soup with Brown Butter

The farm stand a few miles from us starts piling up Cinderella pumpkins every September, those squat, deeply ribbed, almost comically pretty pumpkins that look exactly like the kind a fairy godmother would have turned into a carriage. I am, admittedly, a sucker for them every single year, even though they’re a little more trouble to break down than a butternut and even though I always end up with pumpkin under my fingernails for the rest of the day.

I buy one every fall mostly with the idea of decorating the porch, and every fall it ends up in a soup pot instead, because once I get one home and start thinking about what’s inside that bright orange shell, decoration starts to feel like a waste. Cinderella pumpkin has a sweetness and a silkiness to it that a lot of grocery store pumpkins don’t quite manage, and roasting it first, until the edges go a little caramelized, brings out even more of that.

This soup started as a fairly plain thing, just roasted pumpkin, broth, and cream, and it became what it is now the day I got distracted browning butter for something else entirely and thought, almost as an afterthought, to spoon some into the pot. Brown butter does something to pumpkin soup that I can’t quite explain except to say that it makes the whole thing taste like it’s been simmering all day, even when it hasn’t. Patrick, who claims not to be a soup person, finishes this one every single time and always asks if there’s more, which I have learned to take as the highest compliment my kitchen receives all season.

We tend to eat this on the first genuinely cool evening of the year, with the windows cracked just enough to let some of that crisp air in, a loaf of something crusty on the table, and not much else required to call it a proper fall dinner.