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Frogs' Legs a la Mariniere
3 dozen legs 4 tablespoons butter 1 cup chopped mushrooms 4 shallots 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup white wine 1 cup consomme Yolks of 4 eggs 2 tablespoons cream Saute frogs' legs, mushrooms and shallots in butter. As soon as well colored dredge with flour and seasonings, add wine and consomme, cover and simmer for ten minutes. Mix the yolks of eggs with cream and stir into the boiling mixture. Remove at once from the fire and serve.
A classic French sauté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The success or failure of the dish is entirely in that last step.
- The hinge: do not let the yolks boilThe original says to stir the yolks into the "boiling mixture," which will scramble them. Pull the pan off the heat first, temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of the hot liquid, then stir it back in and swirl over low heat only until the sauce coats a spoon.
- Quantity and yieldThree dozen legs means 36 individual legs, or 18 joined pairs as they are usually sold frozen. That serves four to six as a main course with rice or bread to catch the sauce.
- Buying frogs' legsSold frozen in pairs at Asian and Latin markets, from both farmed and wild-caught stock. Thaw fully and pat very dry, or they will steam rather than color in the butter.
- Cooking timeTen minutes of covered simmering is long for legs that are mostly thin bone and a small amount of delicate meat. Five to seven minutes is enough; the flesh should just release from the bone.
- Sauté orderSauté order -- The original starts legs, mushrooms and shallots together; if you prefer, color the legs in butter first, then add the mushrooms, and the shallots last — chopped shallot burns in the time it takes to brown meat. Four shallots, finely chopped, comes to roughly a third to a half cup.
- ConsomméA clear, well-seasoned chicken or veal broth. Unsalted stock is safer here since the sauce reduces; use it and adjust the salt at the end.
- WineA dry white — Muscadet, Chablis, an unoaked Sauvignon Blanc. Nothing sweet, and nothing labelled "cooking wine."
- ThickeningOne tablespoon of flour for two cups of liquid gives a thin sauce by design; the yolks do most of the binding. If the finished sauce is looser than you want, reduce it before the liaison goes in, not after.
À la marinière — "in the sailor's manner" — normally describes shellfish cooked in white wine with shallots, as in moules marinière, and the name carried over to any dish built on that wine-and-shallot base, frogs' legs included. Frogs' legs were standard French restaurant fare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and American cookbooks of the period filed them under fish rather than meat. Their appearance in a flour miller's promotional cookbook is worth noting: Gold Medal's booklets mixed plain biscuit and bread formulas with a handful of self-consciously French restaurant dishes. The egg-yolk-and-cream finish is the classic liaison of French sauce work.