Egusi soup Period COrigin theory CVerified

Egusi soup is made by grinding the seeds of a cucurbit called egusi and simmering them with leafy greens, meat and fish. The oil and protein in the seed give the soup its thick mouthfeel and deep savour. That is the heart of the dish.

The egusi seed, its main ingredient, is a long-established local crop. The watermelon-like type of egusi can be traced through more than four thousand years of cultivation in north-east Africa, and West Africa has grown it for several centuries and more. A six-thousand-year-old seed from a Libyan site carries what looks like a mark left by a tooth cracking it open — a sign that the eating of the seed itself, before the flesh, is an old habit, exactly the egusi way of using the plant.

The cooking is done entirely by hand in the old manner: the seed is ground on a stone or in a mortar and simmered in an earthen pot. The ingredients grow within the region and come to hand there. And the place it was served was no particular court or institution but the everyday home tables of people across West Africa — the Yoruba, the Igbo and many others. Egusi soup is a dish rooted in the land from before the colonial period. There is, however, no single inventor or exact date to be traced from the sources; its beginnings remain a matter of several views.

Egusi soup is often trailed by the telling that 'the Yoruba made it', or that it goes back, at root, to the invention of one people or one person. But tying the dish to a single origin does not hold up against the evidence.

Egusi has been eaten across a wide swathe of West Africa. The Igbo egwusi is a loan from the Yoruba egusi, and the same seed goes into daily pots in Ghana and Benin. The name means 'to grind and open', so the very act of grinding the seed is written into the word itself. As for the cooking, the anthropologist William Bascom, in his 'Yoruba Cooking' of 1951, set down the steps — shelling the melon seed, grinding it on a grinding stone, boiling it and adding it to the soup — and this stands as the earliest description that can be followed in the written record. The depth of seed use shown by archaeobotany, together with genetics, language and ethnography, points from several independent directions to a dish that is not any one person's invention but a native food with roots spread wide across the region.

There is a further point about the seed. In 2010, Schaefer and Renner showed through genetic analysis that the West African white egusi (the gourd-shaped seed) and a separate New World plant are the same species, and pointed to a human-carried crossing of the Atlantic — possibly in the era of the slave trade. This raises the possibility that one of the main egusi seeds is not native. Even so, the date of that crossing is not firm enough to date the dish, and the watermelon-type egusi that is the mainstay of egusi soup is native. The debate over the seed's provenance and the native standing of the dish are two questions that have to be read apart.