A soup of dried pawpaw (mbuer) flakes cooked with palm oil, meat and egusi, described in the Nigerian press as a special delicacy of the Tiv of Benue State.
Dried pawpaw flakes, palm oil, beef, egusi (melon seed), onion, seasoning.
Beef is fried and its stock is put in a pot with palm oil, egusi, onion and seasoning. After a few minutes of cooking, the pawpaw flakes are added.
Eaten with a swallow such as pounded yam, fufu, eba or semovita.
Described in the Nigerian press as a special Tiv delicacy.
Pawpaw soup has drawn attention in the Nigerian press as a dish particular to the Tiv. The Guardian (Lagos) ran a feature in June 2018 under the title "Pawpaw soup – a special Tiv delicacy", and the Wikipedia article on the soup, drawing on that and later recipe articles, describes it as common to the Tiv of Benue State, made from pawpaw flakes, palm oil, beef and egusi, and best eaten with a swallow such as pounded yam, fufu, eba or semovita.
Pawpaw, mbuer in Tiv, is not native to Africa. According to the Useful Tropical Plants database, the papaya (Carica papaya) probably originated in Central America and southern Mexico. It is a small, fast-growing but short-lived evergreen tree 3 to 10 metres tall, usually without side branches, with a soft, somewhat hollow trunk. Besides the ripe fruit, the immature green fruit is eaten as a vegetable, boiled or added to soups, and it can be preserved by drying. Male flowers and very young leaves are also cooked as greens, though they are bitter, and older leaves contain alkaloids.
Egusi, the melon seed that thickens the soup, has an older history in Tivland. Akiga Sai, writing in 1935, describes white and brown melons grown on the yam farms, the brown one being used for soups, and records that the Tiv obtained both from the Udam.
In Tiv the dried-pawpaw soup belongs to a family called igyande, soups made from dried vegetables. The Tiv food guide tivpeople.com explains that there are many kinds of igyande, made from dried raw pawpaw, dried okra and other dried produce; the Tiv cooking channel MDEVAAN's recipe videos call the pawpaw soup igyande mbwue, "dried unripe pawpaw", and also make it with egusi as igyande mbwue ha ichegh. A recipe posted by a Tiv cook, Irene Nongomin, in 2017 cooks shredded dried unripe pawpaw in a base of palm oil, blended pepper, onion and locust beans, thickened with ground fried groundnuts, with dried fish and dried beef, and serves it with semo or eba; so groundnuts, egusi and beniseed are all used to thicken the soup in different homes.
Note on sources: the Wikipedia article calls the flakes "dry pawpaw flakes" in one place and "unripe pawpaw flakes" in another; the sources do not say which is usual.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Pawpaw soup" (citing The Guardian, 23 June 2018, and FabWoman, 22 January 2020); tivpeople.com, "Tiv Food" (Internet Archive copy, 25 January 2025); MDEVAAN, "How to prepare Igyande Mbwue soup", YouTube; Irene Nongomin, "Unripe Pawpaw Soup", Cookpad, 31 May 2017; Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.); Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Bergsma and Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015, chapter two.
Other Foods
See the Tiv people and the Tiv language in our Nigeria Heritage Archive: the states and local government areas where Tiv communities live, neighbouring peoples, population figures and sources.