Frittatensuppe

Snapshot

Clear beef broth with fine ribbons of sliced savoury pancake. The lighter of the two canonical Austrian soup starters, and the most reliable indicator of whether a kitchen takes its broth seriously.

The Story

Frittatensuppe arrives as a bowl of clear, amber beef broth with a neat nest of thin pancake strips floating in it. The pancakes, called Frittaten, are cooked thin on a flat pan, rolled into a tight cylinder, and cut crosswise into fine ribbons. They go into the hot broth minutes before serving, softening just enough to lose their crispness while holding their form.

The soup is one of the two foundational starters in Austrian cooking. The other is Leberknödelsuppe. Between them, these two soups appear on nearly every traditional restaurant menu in the country; if a Gasthof offers a starter at all, it will be one or both. Frittatensuppe is the lighter of the pair, without the mineral depth of liver dumplings, and it reads as elegant when the broth is properly made.

The broth is everything. A genuine clear beef stock takes hours of slow simmering with root vegetables, bay leaves, and peppercorns, followed by careful skimming to achieve transparency. Restaurants that make it well know it. In Salzburg, Stiftskeller St Peter and Zum Eulenspiegel are reliable places to judge the standard.