Aalsuppe appears as a signature dish in 1 Germany cities. See each city's local variant and where to eat it.
Hamburger Aalsuppe · Hamburg
Hamburg's eel soup is a sweet-and-sour Hanseatic broth, despite the name often historically a soup of dried fruit, vegetables, meat and bones, with eel as an optional traditional addition.
Aalsuppe's name confused for centuries; Hanseatic Plattdeutsch "aal" means "all" (Allesuppe, all-bits soup), not eel (Aal). The dish was a working-class Sunday soup of leftover bits with dried pears, apples, prunes, vegetables and pork bones, with eel added by harbour-side cooks who had river eels in season. The sweet-sour combination is the Hanseatic signature. Old Commercial Room and Fischereihafen Restaurant cook the canonical Hamburg versions; the optional eel addition is now standard in tourist-facing rooms.
Where to eat in Hamburg:
- Old Commercial Room
- Fischereihafen Restaurant
- Deichgraf