Frogs' Legs
Skin the frogs' legs, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in butter, then in flour, and fry in hot fat. Serve with Sauce Tartare.
Frogs' Legs à la Béchamel Remove skin from legs, season with salt and pepper, melt four tablespoons butter, add frogs' legs and one half cup mushrooms, and sauté. Serve on slices of buttered toast, with Béchamel Sauce.
Frogs' Legs à l'Allemande Remove skins from frogs' legs, season with salt, pepper and lemon juice, and cook in butter five minutes. Add one cup white stock, and simmer until tender. Serve on hot buttered toast, with Allemande Sauce.
Three short treatments of the same ingredient, written for a cook who already knows the mother sauces. The whole thing turns on not overcooking: frog legs are lean and fine-grained, and they go from tender to stringy in a minute or two.
- Buying and skinningFrog legs today are generally sold frozen and already skinned, usually in pairs, most of it imported from Asia (farmed and wild-caught). Thaw in the refrigerator, pat very dry, and reckon on roughly 6 to 8 pairs per person for an entrée portion — the yield of meat is small.
- "Dip in butter"This means melted butter, used as the binder that makes the flour stick, in place of the egg wash a modern cook might reach for. It is not a typographical error for batter.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat." By modern shallow- or deep-frying practice that is around 365-375F. Small legs are done in about 3 minutes, larger ones in 4 to 5; they are cooked when the flesh pulls back from the thin bone and turns opaque white.
- White stockA light unsalted veal or chicken stock, unbrowned. Low-sodium chicken broth stands in acceptably, but reduce the added salt since the sauce will concentrate as it simmers.
- Allemande SauceA velouté finished with egg yolks, cream and lemon — the older name for what later books call sauce parisienne. It must not boil once the yolks go in or it will curdle.
- Béchamel in this bookPeriod béchamel is frequently built on white stock as well as milk, not milk alone. Either way, keep it thin enough to coat rather than blanket the legs.
- Timing the à l'Allemande"Simmer until tender" should be read as five to eight minutes at a bare tremble, no more. Frog legs do not benefit from long braising the way tougher meats do.
- ServingToast dries out fast under sauce; cut it thick, butter it hot, and plate at the last moment.
Frog legs reached American cookbooks by way of French restaurant cooking, and were treated as a genteel course rather than country food — though the supply was largely domestic, from marshes and river bottoms. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston in connection with its chocolate business, is otherwise a general household manual, and the three treatments given here are essentially a lesson in the sauce repertoire: the same ingredient sent out fried with tartare, sautéed under béchamel, or simmered and served with the egg-enriched allemande. American frog populations were heavily harvested through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the commercial trade has since shifted almost entirely to imports.