A piquant pot of prose porn: Nigerian Pepper Soup.
One person's exotic foreign delicacy is someone else's home cooking (and vice versa); food blogger Kitchen Butterfly's recipe for a favorite comfort soup from her native Nigeria serves as both a precise tutorial for people in the former camp and an expatriate's paean to the Taste of Home for those in the latter.
Rain dropping on my window panes, soup misting up the glass in front of me.
When the soup is ready and my bowl is in front of me, I dip my spoon in and an instant later, an eddy is generated - oils, water, sediment, mixed, swirling and totally, totally gorgeous. The oils from the meat and spices set themselves places - mini globules of flavorful and spiced broth, speckled with calabash nutmeg.
The components of the soup begin to dance, a sort of victory, marital celebration - loathe to dive onto the spoon but hankering after it at the same time. The film of oil over the top, glimmers, especially with fluorescent lights. If you look hard enough, you will see strands of Tetrapleura tetraptera.
Though ground, the spices still have coarse bits which separate out into two layers - some sink deep to the bottom like sand on the seafloor and others ride up and are caught, entrained in the liquid and peppering the surface with their varied colours - red, black and brown flecks of deliciousness. The soup is warm and pleasant on my tongue and in my throat, a slight fishiness without the smelliness. In seconds I feel my sinuses clear out. There is an appealing saltiness that reeks of being ‘well-seasoned’ without being concentrated seawater. Slightly savoury without the intense pungency of African dishes. To me, that is. Some other person might disagree.
We all sit - my entire family, drinking up spoon after spoon of bowl after bowl, warmed and united in love. My third culture kids will only have it with chunks of warm baguette, while my husband and I, my cousin who’s visiting and his Welsh wife tuck in in true Naija style - warm boiled yam halves and sweet boiled ripe plantain, drizzled with some thick palm oil sludge. Some warm soup later, and a few chunks of meat, it all becomes a Nigerian symphony. We eat, we drink, we talk and we are merry. And all the while, the skies of Holland open up and pour out their waters.
The post in its entirety, including an illustrated list of traditional Nigerian ingredients and mouthwatering photos of the finished product, can be found here.
(The skies of Dayton, Ohio are opening up and pouring out their waters yet again, and that soup, even without Ms. Soko's lyrical description, looks gooood.)
Rain dropping on my window panes, soup misting up the glass in front of me.
When the soup is ready and my bowl is in front of me, I dip my spoon in and an instant later, an eddy is generated - oils, water, sediment, mixed, swirling and totally, totally gorgeous. The oils from the meat and spices set themselves places - mini globules of flavorful and spiced broth, speckled with calabash nutmeg.
The components of the soup begin to dance, a sort of victory, marital celebration - loathe to dive onto the spoon but hankering after it at the same time. The film of oil over the top, glimmers, especially with fluorescent lights. If you look hard enough, you will see strands of Tetrapleura tetraptera.
Though ground, the spices still have coarse bits which separate out into two layers - some sink deep to the bottom like sand on the seafloor and others ride up and are caught, entrained in the liquid and peppering the surface with their varied colours - red, black and brown flecks of deliciousness. The soup is warm and pleasant on my tongue and in my throat, a slight fishiness without the smelliness. In seconds I feel my sinuses clear out. There is an appealing saltiness that reeks of being ‘well-seasoned’ without being concentrated seawater. Slightly savoury without the intense pungency of African dishes. To me, that is. Some other person might disagree.
We all sit - my entire family, drinking up spoon after spoon of bowl after bowl, warmed and united in love. My third culture kids will only have it with chunks of warm baguette, while my husband and I, my cousin who’s visiting and his Welsh wife tuck in in true Naija style - warm boiled yam halves and sweet boiled ripe plantain, drizzled with some thick palm oil sludge. Some warm soup later, and a few chunks of meat, it all becomes a Nigerian symphony. We eat, we drink, we talk and we are merry. And all the while, the skies of Holland open up and pour out their waters.
The post in its entirety, including an illustrated list of traditional Nigerian ingredients and mouthwatering photos of the finished product, can be found here.
(The skies of Dayton, Ohio are opening up and pouring out their waters yet again, and that soup, even without Ms. Soko's lyrical description, looks gooood.)