Apple-Butternut Velvet Soup

Puréed vegetable soups are delightful. They're ridiculously simple to create, being little more than a cooked and reduced mixture of vegetable and stock or water, and they're often delicious with little effort invested. The thickness and texture of the soup are easily managed by the amount of puréeing that is done, and the amount of liquid used to cook the ingredients. The main vegetable can be cooked before the soup is created, even—roasting, grilling, or poaching various ingredients can lead to a multitude of flavors and a wide variety of soups created from a small palette of basic items. Simple food, done well, is a motto and watchword in modern culinary arts, and it can be traced back to some of the recipes present in Victorian cookbooks—soups with only three or four ingredients were not uncommon. Mrs. Beeton's Turnip Soup calls for:

3 oz. of butter, 9 good-sized turnips, 4 onions, 2 quarts of stock, seasoning to taste.

This simple concept for soup is replicated here, using slightly different ingredients.

Butternut squash is wonderful, as a basic item. They're usually rather inexpensive (I find them regularly for 99¢ per pound) and contain a great deal of flesh with little effort required to seed them. The effort saved in seeding is ceded to peeling them, as they have a rather tough skin that does not peel off easily. If you are willing to move past this—or, indeed, roast them before cooking them into the soup—the results are well worth the effort. A somewhat sweet item, the squash pairs well with apple and nutmeg flavors, leading to the creation of this simple yet elegant soup.

A garnish of nutmeg-spiced chantilly cream (sweetened whipped cream) and an apple crisp make this dish sweet, delightful, and texturally interesting.