How To Make Nigerian Pepper Soup
On this tour, I’ve made a ‘traditional’ Nigerian recipe. Traditional: make one of the country’s national or traditional dishes. Contemporary: take a traditional recipe and contemporize it. Or, using the flavors and techniques of the country we are visiting, create your own recipe. Nigerian pepper soup is ‘ chicken soup to the rest of the world’ - the one ‘soup’ people long for when its blistering cold outside, the same one others lap up at parties and celebrations of every sort.
It is also your one-stop soup for all ails - when you’re down with the flu, when you’ve just had a baby, when you’re recovering from Malaria, and the list goes on and on. And though it is called pepper soup, peppers are not its only component, far from it….and it doesn’t even have to be fiery at all. I guess its the spice from the other ingredients that lend it the name.
I’ll also have you know that this is the only ‘drinking soup’ we have in Nigeria and it exists in quite a few versions. See, we have two categories of ‘soups’ - drinking soups (a party of one) and ‘eating soups’ (actually stews, of which there are many). Anyways, back to pepper soup. You can well imagine that a country the size of Nigeria, with over 100 million people will have regional varieties of pepper soup - all broths, with different spice combinations.
All well and good. In the east, the Ibos (a large ethnic group) prepare their pepper soup with tomatoes, onions and spices, as do the ‘Rivers’ people in the southeast. In other parts of the country, the little-known traditional pepper soup spices are employed in the making. Where I come from, in the ‘Delta’, pepper soup is not pepper soup without ataiko, uda , gbafilo and rigije, amongst others - native names for ingredients that are unique to our part of the world.
At home in Warri where I grew up, we’d always add lemon grass leaves (not the stalks) from our thriving bushes which lend clean and citrusy flavours to the broth. Often too, the broth would be ‘finished’ off with the addition of chiffonaded blades of ‘scent leaves or wild basil’ at the end of cooking.
Scent leaves have a peculiar taste - a bit bitter and citrusy, with a sweet scent. Minty and earthy, I love the way Yemisi describes it on NEXT in an article, ‘FOOD MATTERS: Plantain and scent leaf porridge’. ’s arm; the corn is absurdly fresh, giving way under your fingers and the plantains are yellow and fragrant when ripe.
Even when it isn’t raining, the flame of the forest is swaying its own rain of pollen. It might be why they say Calabar people can’t get their minds off matters pertaining to the appetites. At every turn, I want to put something in my mouth. Scent leaf can be grown by a toddler in this environment. It is as aggressive, as prolific as a weed.
Its complexity confuses even scientific categorisation. There is a tonic made out of it that is said to alleviate, if not cure absolutely everything that goes wrong with the human body. The spices that define peppersoup result in a flavor profile that is typical of Nigerian, if not African cooking - bitter, sweet and somewhat herby with some astringency. Aromatic, pungent, intensely flavoured and fragrant, capturing all the nostalgia of my youth, and some of adulthood…leaving nothing behind.
At home in Holland, I have some but not all of the spices and I’ll introduce you to a few of them, each called by many different names. The dilemma of a populous country is the multiplicity of languages and Nigeria is no exception. The name of one spice will vary from one village to the next town, only a few hundred metres away. And further, one outside their locality will struggle to find the spice they need for their pot of soup because what is the name in their dialect, suddenly becomes an insult in another language.
