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Fried Frogs' Legs
I POUND FROGS' LEGS SALT AND PEPPER CRACKER CRUMBS 14 POUND BUTTER Wash legs and dry them well, season and roll in cracker crumbs. Fry lightly in butter till golden, 5 minutes or less. Eat with tartare sauce if possible.
A four-ingredient pan-fry that depends almost entirely on dry legs and a short time in the pan. Everything else is seasoning.
- Butter quantityThe stated "14 pound butter" is a lost fraction for a quarter pound, or 8 tablespoons (115 g). That is generous for a pound of legs; 2-3 tablespoons is enough for a single skillet load.
- Dry them properlyThis is the hinge. Frogs' legs hold a surprising amount of water and wet legs will steam rather than brown, and the crumb coating will slide off. Pat them dry, then leave them on a rack or paper for ten minutes before crumbing.
- Five minutes is rightDo not extend it. The meat is lean and fine-grained, closer to a chicken wing than to fish, and it turns stringy and dry with overcooking. Two to three minutes a side for average legs; large ones need a minute more.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs meant plain soda or water crackers rolled fine, not seasoned crumbs. Crushed saltines are the closest current match; panko browns faster and is not a substitute if you want the original texture.
- Watch the butterButter alone will brown and can burn before the coating sets over a hot burner. A spoonful of neutral oil added to the pan raises the smoke point without changing the flavour much.
- SourcingMost frogs' legs sold now are imported and frozen, usually in graded pairs, whether farmed or wild-caught. Thaw them fully in the refrigerator and dry them very thoroughly, as frozen legs release more liquid.
- YieldA pound of legs is one generous serving or two modest ones. Scale up but fry in batches, since a crowded pan drops the heat and defeats the browning.
- Tartare sauceThe "if possible" suggests the sauce was not always to hand. Any mayonnaise-based sauce with capers, pickle and lemon works; a plain squeeze of lemon is a simpler alternative.
Frogs' legs sit at an odd point in American cooking: French restaurants made them a delicacy, but for a great many people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they were simply what you brought home from a night at the pond with a light and a gig. Camp and country cooking often treated them much as it treated small fish and squirrel, dredged in whatever dry crumb was at hand and fried in butter. The advice to serve tartare sauce "if possible" suggests a cook working somewhere without a full larder.