Frog Salad
One pound white, medium sized frogs, onehalf teaspoonful salt, one teaspoonful pepper, one tablespoonful butter, one tablespoonful lemon juice, two artichokes, three potatoes, three hard boiled eggs, rule for French dressing. Cook the frogs in water until tender, and season with salt, pepper, butter and lemon juice; when cold cut the meat into inch squares, and put them into a bowl with cooked artichoke bottoms, potatoes and hard boiled eggs, all cut the same size as the frogs. Macerate with French dressing for fifteen minutes. Drain the salad in a sieve, and arrange it in a salad bowl, dressing it with a mayonnaise, and smoothing the top to a dome. Split some lobster claw meat in two, season and form into a rosette in the center of the salad; decorate around with truffles and gherkins, having a lettuce heart exactly in the middle.
A composed hotel-style salad from the era when frogs' legs were standard restaurant fare. The technique is straightforward; most of the work is in the trimming and the assembly.
- "One pound white, medium sized frogs"This means dressed frogs — in practice the hind legs, sold frozen in pairs at Asian groceries and some fish counters. A pound of legs yields appreciably less than a pound of picked meat, so buy extra if you want a salad that fills a bowl.
- Cooking timeFrog leg meat is lean and fine-grained and turns cottony fast. Poach at a bare simmer for 5–8 minutes depending on size, until the meat pulls cleanly from the thin bones, then cool in the liquid. "Until tender" in the original invites overcooking.
- Pick the bones carefullyFrog legs have few bones, but they are thin and hard and do not soften. Pick the meat by hand while it is still warm and check each piece before cutting into squares.
- Artichoke bottomsTwo globe artichokes trimmed to the bottoms give very little; frozen or jarred artichoke bottoms are the practical substitute. Avoid marinated hearts, whose vinegar overwhelms the dressing.
- PotatoesUse waxy potatoes, boiled in their skins and peeled while warm so the cubes hold their shape through maceration.
- Macerate, then drainFifteen minutes in French dressing (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar) is a seasoning step, not a marinade. Draining in a sieve matters, or the mayonnaise coating will slide off.
- The garnishLobster claw meat, truffles and gherkins were the standard vocabulary of a dressed-up buffet salad. Any of them can be dropped without harming the dish; the lettuce heart at the crown is what holds the composition together visually.
- YieldAs written, a first course for four to six. The mayonnaise coating means it should be assembled shortly before serving and held cold.
Frogs' legs were not exotic in American cooking around 1900 — they were a marsh-country staple in Louisiana, the Midwest and upstate New York, and simultaneously a French-menu luxury in city hotels, where they appeared fried, in poulette sauce, or as here in a composed salad. The construction of this dish is pure professional garde-manger: cut everything to one uniform dice, season it with a vinaigrette, drain it, mask it with mayonnaise, smooth it to a dome and crown the dome with something expensive. That method was applied indiscriminately to lobster, chicken, sweetbreads and game. Wild frog harvesting is now regulated in most places and species vary in status by region; the frog legs in commerce today are overwhelmingly imported, which is why the recipe reads stranger to us than it did to its first readers.