Soup is the perfect fall food. It’s warm and flavorful, chock full of perfect bite-sized bits. It’s like a hot tub for your mouth. You can tuck into a bowl, dunk a piece of crusty bread, and let your day melt away while you wait for winter. Here are five of the most popular soups for your autumnal enjoyment.

Butternut Squash

There are two signs that we’ve officially entered fall. One is the ubiquity of pumpkin spice everything, and the other is steaming bowls of butternut love popping up on tables everywhere.

Butternut squash soup’s creamy goodness is perfect on its own, but it can also serve as a base for all manner of additions. If you sat an infinite number of Alton Browns in front of an infinite supply of recipe books, you’d never wind up with the same butternut squash soup twice. It’s perfection in a bowl.

Minestrone

Minestrone is the soup that eats like a meal. Or it’s a meal masquerading as soup, depending on your philosophical leanings. It’s hearty and heartwarming, stuffed full of vegetables and pasta, and sometimes beans, barley or lentils.

Carnivores around the globe are surprised to learn minestrone is classically vegetarian, though it needn’t be. Sausage and ham make welcome additions to this soup which offers comfort to the winter-weary throughout the season.

We’ve all seen images of St. Bernard’s rescuing lost travelers off of the icy tundra. Those barrels they carry around their necks? Full of minestrone soup. Don’t look it up.

Chicken Noodle

When archaeologists 10,000 years in the future are sifting through the rubble of our civilization, assigning images to common household items, “soup” will almost certainly be represented as a bowl of chicken noodle.

This is western civilization’s go-to soup, for both hunger and healing. How can you go wrong with large chunks of chicken relaxing in a flavorful broth, accompanied by lengths of thick-cut egg noodles? If there’s a better expression of “a hug in a bowl” we’ve never seen it.

While it’s brilliant right out of the pot, it’s often even better the next day, once the noodles have absorbed the broth, transforming it into chicken noodle stew. You’re welcome.

New England Clam Chowder

Chowders of all stripes make excellent fall fare, but New England clam stands out as the Grand Poobah of the clan. The delicate saltiness of the clams paired with the umami of the chicken stock, offset by the heartiness of the potatoes, and blasted into outer space with the addition of bacon creates a fall soup that feels like a warm woolen blanket wrapped tightly around your soul.

French Onion

It’s a scientific fact that layering a thick, gloopy mass of molten cheese over anything will improve it a thousand fold, but French onion soup is so flavorful that even without its cheese it might still be on this list. But we guarantee that you’ll lose a hand if you try and pull off someone else’s cheese.

French onion is a flavor dynamo, a piquant delight that would leap from its bowl if it wasn’t smothered in gruyere. Apart from the flavor, the textural combination of gooey, chewy, spongy and liquid creates a mouthfeel that can bring a smile to your face no matter what sort of day you’re having.

For other fun food-related articles check out How Packing a Healthy Lunch Can Transform Your Workday and Are Millennials Ruining Cooking, Too?!