Egusi is ground melon seed — not the seed of the melon you'd eat as fruit, but a variety grown specifically for its seeds, which are dried, hulled and ground into a pale, slightly oily flour. It's one of the most widely used soup thickeners in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and across West Africa, and it's the base of egusi soup, one of the most popular dishes in Nigerian cooking.
To cook with it, egusi is typically fried in oil (often red palm oil) with onions, pepper and stock until it clumps into soft, textured lumps, then simmered with leafy greens, meat, fish or stockfish. The result is thick, nutty and rich rather than watery like a European-style soup, and it's usually eaten with a swallow — pounded yam, fufu, semolina or eba — rather than with a spoon.
We stock both pre-ground egusi for convenience and whole egusi seeds if you prefer to grind your own for a fresher flavour. If you're new to cooking it, start with a smaller pack size until you've found the fry-and-simmer method that works for your kitchen — like most soup bases, it rewards a bit of practice more than a strict recipe.
You'll find egusi and the rest of our West African soup ingredients — ogbono, locust beans, crayfish, palm oil — in our grocery collection, with delivery across Melbourne.