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Frog Saddles
3 tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1/2 cup cream Salt and pepper Few gratings of nutmeg Melt the butter; add the flour; stir until smooth; add the cream gradually and stir until boiling. Put in the legs; season and cover; cook twenty minutes, adding more cream if necessary.
A plain cream sauce for frog legs, written for a chafing dish and assuming the cook already has the frogs dressed and to hand. The quantities given cover the sauce only.
- The missing ingredientNo amount of frog is stated. A sauce of this size (3 tbsp butter, 1½ tbsp flour, ½ cup cream) would coat the hind legs of roughly half a dozen frogs, enough for two, though the book leaves the quantity to the cook.
- What a saddle isThe "saddle" is the joined pair of hind legs with the short section of backbone between them, on the analogy of a saddle of lamb. Frozen frog legs today are commonly sold as joined pairs, which is the nearest equivalent, though usually without the back.
- Twenty minutes is far too longFrog legs are lean white muscle that sets and dries much like a chicken wing tip. Five to eight minutes in the simmering sauce, until the flesh loosens from the thin bone, is enough; twenty minutes gives you cotton wool. This is the one change worth making.
- Cream means heavy creamCream of the period was generally richer than modern table cream and stood up better to heat. Use heavy cream; anything lighter is liable to curdle against the flour and the frogs' juices.
- Chafing-dish heatGentle heat -- If this was meant for a chafing dish, as the surrounding section suggests, the heat would have been gentle. On a modern burner keep it at the barest simmer, or set the pan over water, or the flour-thickened cream will scorch on the bottom.
- SeasoningNutmeg with cream sauce is a period signature and a few gratings is genuinely all that is meant. A squeeze of lemon at the end, though not in the original, sharpens what is otherwise a very soft dish.
- ServingServe straight from the pan over toast points or in patty shells, both common vehicles for a creamed dish of this sort.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American households from the 1890s through the 1910s: a spirit-lamp pan brought to the table let a hostess make a hot dish in front of guests without a servant, and cookbooks of the period devote whole sections to it. The repertoire was necessarily small and quick-cooking — oysters, lobster, chicken, mushrooms, eggs, and frog legs — nearly always finished in cream, butter or sherry. Frog legs were a familiar market item then rather than a novelty, taken from wild bullfrogs and sold by the pair or dozen. Calling the cut a "saddle" borrows butcher's language from lamb and hare, and flatters a very small piece of meat.