Hamburger Aalsuppe

A broth of ham bone and beef, thick with vegetables, prunes, dried apples and pears, sharpened with vinegar and sweetened with the fruit, with pieces of eel added at the end and small herb dumplings floating on top: Hamburger Aalsuppe is the sweet-and-sour soup of the Hamburg kitchen and one of the few dishes in Germany that pairs fish with fruit in the same bowl. The name is the subject of a long local argument. One camp holds that aal is a corruption of the Low German all, everything, because the soup was a way of using up the week's leftovers, and that the eel was added later to satisfy tourists who read the menu literally; the other insists the eel was always there, since the Elbe was full of it. Both agree the soup predates the nineteenth century and that a Hamburg restaurant without it on the menu is suspect.