Indigenous-spice pepper soup (pepe, before chili) Period COrigin theory BVerified

West African pepper soup is a nourishing broth in which meat or fish is simmered lightly with spices. The chili that lends its heat in kitchens today is a New World plant, and it arrived on this coast in Portuguese ships only in the sixteenth century. Before that, the heat and aroma that the Igbo, Yoruba, and Niger Delta peoples of the pre-colonial era dropped into the pot came from spices rooted in the land.

The lead spice is melegueta pepper (Aframomum melegueta, also known as grains of paradise). A relative of ginger, its seeds carry a pepper-like heat when chewed, and it was a long-established West African crop, on everyday tables and in the medicine chest from early on. To it were added grains of Selim (Xylopia aethiopica), whose slender pods are used as a spice, the fragrant calabash nutmeg, and the leaves and berries of the climbing uziza. All of these were gifts of West African soil, and people combined them to simmer meat and fish into a warming bowl.

These spices also travelled beyond the kitchen. Caravans crossing the desert to the north carried melegueta pepper into the Mediterranean world, where in medieval Europe the seed was prized as a substitute for black pepper. The coast where it grew came to be called the Grain Coast after that very commodity. At home, a simmered broth centred on these local spices was already on the table before chili ever arrived.

There is a way of telling the story in which pepper soup's heat has always come from chili. But chili is a New World plant, and it took root in sub-Saharan West Africa only from the sixteenth century onward, through Portuguese trade. For a pepper soup older than that to have been made hot with chili is simply not possible.

That melegueta pepper was already traded and eaten before chili arrived is shown from several independent angles. Fifteenth-century European cookery books list melegueta pepper among their ingredients under the name graynys of parise. In 1469 King Afonso V of Portugal granted the merchant Fernão Gomes a monopoly on the Gulf of Guinea trade, and this spice was among its wares. Later, the coast where it grew would take the name Grain Coast from this spice. A cookery book, a charter of trade, and a place name, unrelated to one another, each carry word of the same spice spreading.

The modern pepper soup, hot with chili, is a newer form built upon this broth of local spices, and its heat could come from chili only from the sixteenth century onward. The dish of a simmered broth seasoned and perfumed with local spices, on the other hand, is far older. How far back it reaches, and when the name pepper soup settled, are still unknown. What the records show is that the spice at the heart of that bowl was already traded and eaten before chili came.