Potato Pepper Soup
Aperçu
Potato pepper soup is a West African pepper soup built on potato rather than meat or fish, hot, thin, aromatic and quick. Pepper soup is a category rather than a single recipe, and what defines it is the spice blend rather than the main ingredient. The essential component is calabash nutmeg, called ehuru or ehu in Nigeria, a seed with a warm, camphorous aroma quite unlike ordinary nutmeg. Alongside it sit uda, uziza seed and other aromatics, ground together into the mixture sold across Nigeria simply as pepper soup spice. That blend is what makes any pepper soup taste like pepper soup, whether the pot contains goat meat, catfish, chicken or, as here, potato. The broth stays thin deliberately. There is no thickener and no palm oil, so the aromatics and the chilli have nowhere to hide, and the heat is meant to be genuine. It is frequently eaten when someone has a cold, on much the same reasoning as Ghanaian light soup. The vegetarian version is an unusual thing in the pepper soup family and makes a quick, light meal.
