Every autumn, as the shocking color of orange drenches store shelves and windows, bags of candy nestle side by side with back-to-school supplies, I switch gears to fall menus. I pull out my recipes for chili and stews and whatever else will simmer all day in the slow cooker that has been empty since last spring. I lean in to the idea of hearty, creamy, substantial foods instead of the Caprese salads and tomato reductions and quickly prepared light foods that have filled the summer.
My own ode to orange comes in the Bisque of Butternut Squash recipe I’ve been making every Thanksgiving since I took a one-evening cooking class hosted by a high-end kitchen store in 1990. I took the class with a good friend, the employer of my then-partner. His tennis-pro wife and my good-natured salesman husband sat this one out.
I remember the store, as I’ve always had a thing for kitchen stores, and I remember the soup, but I have no memories of the class. It’s possible I inserted myself into Bernie’s Bisque, stole the soup’s history and remade it into mine.
Perhaps it was only Bernie who attended the class, Bernie who learned to sauté the aromatics, boil the squash in the broth, scoop scorching hot squash flesh from its soft and malleable shell, Bernie who painstakingly prepared the soup and then proudly served it to my husband and I some brisk autumn night in Santa Monica, over conversation and stories around his kitchen table for Thanksgiving. Bernie was exactly the kind of energetic and exuberant man to follow a whim to take a cooking class at a shiny store with stainless steel counters and top-of-the-line appliances. Exactly the kind of man to share the recipe with anyone, regardless that he spent the hours learning it.
I acquired several things at that time – a first husband, a step-daughter, invitations to dinner parties as a married couple, a Cuisinart, a set of china and crystal stemware, a cherry-on-top doctorate degree, wedding photos, and a hand-made wedding canopy, quilted from squares of fabric individually decorated by family and friends, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever created to mark a life event that would surely last forever, only to come off the wall, get folded into the size of a picnic blanket, stored so it could age and yellow in a box that never made it to this life.
If Bernie were reading this today, and it’s true that only he took the class so technically it’s his soup that I’ve inadvertently pilfered and passed off as my own, he’d chuckle instead of get mad. Some men have enough in this life so they readily share what they learn and have, in fact enjoy what they have more when they share it, never for recognition, never for acknowledgement, just the chance to participate in the proliferation of joy, the chance to bubble and ferment the sweetness of life the way sugar swells in moist yeasty glass dishes. If Bernie knew I’ve carried on what began as his tradition in the first place, he’d smile his generous smile, pull up a chair at my table, and heartily spoon the stuff in, tell a story it reminds him of, the time when someone else he knew and loved poached a bit of history or made a little mischief or couldn’t remember something from their past or just plain lived life the way we’re meant to, outside the lines and a bit wonky.
This will be the 24th year I make the soup. It’s a precious and time-consuming recipe – calling for tart apples and three thick slices of French bread with the crusts removed – details that make the one who prepares it forever doubt how it will turn out. How thick is a slice of French bread? How tart should the apples be? Is the squash the right size?
If I were smart, I’d make it some other time in Fall or Winter, de-couple it from a meal that needs no starter, even though the elegance of the presentation and the first appreciative taste murmurs make it seem worth the science-lab-like precision and expenditure of time and effort to cook the squash, prepare French bread and apples, puree it, stir in the cream, and finally garnish each bowl with a dollop of whipped cream and freshly grated nutmeg.
I wonder if Bernie still makes the soup. When I typed up the original recipe, I called it Bernie Weiss’ Bisque of Butternut Squash. Sometime after leaving every aspect of that life, including the state, I retyped it and renamed it as my own. To those who never knew me in the former life, never knew Bernie, or the story of the soup, it simply became my soup. My new life mates were happy to sip and savor the tasty, beautiful, elegant, dish so precious I still call it “bisque.”
Nothing, not even a soup recipe, is what it seems.