Egusi soup

Ingredients

• Ground egusi seeds300 g
• Beef — in pieces600 g
• Stockfish200 g
• Smoked fish200 g
• Palm oil150 ml
• Spinach or ugwu leaves400 g
• Onions2
• Scotch bonnet3
• Ground crayfish3 tbsp
• Stock cube2
• Fermented locust beans2 tbsp
• Saltto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Simmer the beef with onion, stock cube and salt for forty minutes. Keep the broth.

   45 min

2. 2

   Soak the stockfish in boiling water for twenty minutes and break it into pieces, removing bones.

   25 min

3. 3

   Mix the ground egusi with a little water into a thick paste that holds its shape.

   8 min

4. 4

   Heat the palm oil until clear and fry the onion and ground scotch bonnet for three minutes.

   6 min

5. 5

   Drop the egusi paste into the oil by the spoonful without stirring and let the lumps set for five minutes.

   8 min

6. 6

   Pour in the broth and add the meat, both fish, the crayfish and the locust beans, and cook twenty minutes.

   22 min

7. 7

   Stir in the greens for the last five minutes and serve with fufu or eba.

   8 min

About the dish

Egusi seeds are ground and added in lumps rather than stirred through. The lumps set in the broth and stay distinguishable — that is the correct texture, and a smooth soup reads as a failure.

The palm oil is heated until clear but never to smoking. Overheated it loses both colour and flavour, and in Nigeria heating it is considered a skill in itself.

The soup is eaten with a swallow — fufu, eba or pounded yam. No spoon is used: a ball of dough is pinched off, dipped and swallowed without chewing.

Worth knowing

• — Do not break the egusi lumps with a spatula. A stirred soup becomes a uniform porridge, and in Nigeria it would be called spoiled.
• — Palm oil cannot be replaced with vegetable oil. It gives both the colour and the flavour, and without it this is a different soup with a different name.
• — The greens go in at the very end. Boiled, they lose their colour and the soup turns dark and gluey.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

780 kcal

Protein

48 g

Fat

54 g

Carbs

22 g

More from Nigeria

• Jollof rice — Rice cooked in a thick sauce of tomato, pepper and onion. The sauce is reduced dark before the rice goes in.
• Suya — Beef skewers in a ground peanut and spice rub, applied twice — before and after grilling.
• Puff puff — Yeasted balls of loose batter, deep-fried crisp outside and airy within.