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Frogs
The green frog is the only kind used for the table. Peel off the skin from the hind-quarters, sprinkle with salt and pepper, grease the gridiron well with lard, place the hind-quarters on the irons over a good fire, and broil gently to a nice brown; pour butter over them, and serve hot.
A three-line grilling recipe that assumes you have caught and dressed the frogs yourself. The technique translates directly to a modern grill or broiler; the sourcing does not.
- The hinge: cook them fastFrog legs are lean and very thin, closer to a chicken wing than a chicken thigh. Over a hot fire they need roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side; "broil gently to a nice brown" in the original means keeping them a little off the fiercest heat, not cooking them long. Past about 10 minutes total they turn stringy and dry.
- "The green frog"Nineteenth-century American books use this loosely for the native edible pond frogs, chiefly the bullfrog and the green frog. Wild frog harvest is now regulated or closed in many states and seasons; what you will actually find is farmed legs, usually frozen, imported from Asia and sold in pairs. Thaw them fully and pat dry or they will steam rather than brown.
- Hind quarters onlyThe saddle-and-legs section is the only part with worthwhile meat. Frozen commercial legs come already skinned and trimmed, so the peeling step is done for you.
- GridironAn iron grate set over coals. A grill over medium-hot coals or a gas grill on medium-high is the direct equivalent; a preheated stovetop grill pan or a broiler rack about 4 inches under a hot element also works.
- Greasing with lardLard is what this book calls for, and it still performs well, since it has a higher smoke point than butter. Any neutral high-heat oil will do the same job. Grease the bars and the legs both, since there is no fat in the meat to protect it.
- The butter finishPouring melted butter over at the end is the whole sauce. Browning the butter first, or adding lemon, parsley or a little crushed garlic to it, is a reasonable modern extension of the same idea.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. Reckon roughly a pound of legs per person as a main course, about half that as a first course.
Frog legs are often found in the fish chapter of American cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reputation as a restaurant delicacy in the United States is generally traced to French influence, by way of New Orleans and of the French-trained chefs in the big Eastern hotels, though in much of the country they were simply what a boy with a gig and a lantern brought home. The brisk certainty of "the green frog is the only kind used for the table" reflects a period when identification was the cook's problem, not the supplier's; today nearly all frog legs sold in the United States are farmed and imported, and wild-caught frogs are hedged about with seasons and limits that would have baffled this book's readers.