Central Europe · Volume 17, The Herring Fleet and the Sausage Stand
Aalsuppe
Hamburg
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Genuinely odd, and confirmed rather than exaggerated: despite its name, Hamburg's Aalsuppe was originally not primarily an eel soup at all. Its Low German name, "Allerlei", everything in it, is the more honest description. It began as a hearty stew of cured meat, typically ham bones, soup vegetables, and, unexpectedly, dried fruit, plums, apples and apricots, its sweet-sour character built from that dried fruit against a ham bone cooked in vinegar water.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. About 1 hour 30 minutes to cook, the eel poached separately for the final 8 minutes.
Ingredients
- 1 smoked ham hock or bone
- 1.5 litres water or light stock
- 1 large bunch soup vegetables, carrot, leek, celeriac, diced
- 150g mixed dried fruit, roughly chopped
- a splash a splash of white wine vinegar
- 400g eel, cut into short lengths
- to taste, 1, a few salt, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns
- a handful semolina or small dumplings, to finish
Method
- Simmer the ham bone with the vegetables, vinegar, bay leaf and peppercorns in water or light stock for an hour to build the base, seasoning with salt.
- Add the dried fruit and simmer a further 30 minutes until it has softened and sweetened the broth.
- Poach the eel separately in a little of the broth, gently, for around eight minutes, so it does not overcook while the base continues to develop.
- Combine everything at the point of serving, finishing with a few small dumplings or a spoon of semolina stirred through to thicken lightly.
What a modern chef changes
A four-hour stock, a smooth dried-fruit purée and briefly cold-smoked eel
Method
- The ham bone base is built as a proper stock, roasted first for colour, then simmered for four hours and reduced by half, rather than the shorter one-hour version above, giving a far deeper base without changing a single ingredient.
- The dried fruit is not simmered directly into the broth but poached separately in a light syrup of its own, then blitzed to a smooth purée in a high-power blender and stirred through the finished broth at the end, giving a cleaner sweet-sour balance than fruit pieces breaking down unevenly in the pot.
- The eel is cold-smoked briefly, 45 minutes at the coast's own technique-ladder temperature of under 25°C, before being poached, adding a genuine smoke note this dish never traditionally had but which sits naturally alongside its existing sweet-sour, richly savoury character.
- The dumplings are replaced with a single quenelle of potato and egg yolk, poached rather than boiled hard, so the starch thickening is controlled and elegant rather than the rustic, cloudy result of dumplings breaking slightly into the broth.