Pepper Soup with Cocoyam or Plantain

Pepper soup is the thin, fiercely spiced West African broth built on meat or fish, chilli and a set of aromatic seeds that give it a flavour nothing else reproduces. This version comes with cocoyam or plantain cooked in the pot, which turns a light soup into a full meal. The ingredients place it in Cameroon rather than Nigeria, whatever the general framing suggests. Njansang, the crushed seed used as a thickener and flavouring, and bush pepper are Cameroonian pantry staples, and Cameroon pepper, the dark powder ground from dried scotch bonnets, appears throughout. Nigerian pepper soup leans instead on ehuru, the African nutmeg, and on utazi and uziza leaves. They are cousins rather than the same soup. Pepper soup is served in restaurants and bars across the region, and it is genuinely a category rather than a single recipe: catfish, goat meat, chicken, cow foot and assorted offal all have their own versions, several of which are on this site. The source makes extensive medicinal claims for it, that it cures fevers, clears congestion and aids weight loss. None of that has been carried across. It is a hot, restorative bowl of soup, which is a reasonable thing to say about it, and it is not medicine.