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New Orleans Fry
Wash hind legs and dry well, season with salt and pepper and roll in flour. Fry in olive oil until light brown. Remove to hot platter and make a sauce by tossing minced garlic and parsley into the olive oil that frogs' legs were cooked in. Cook for only a minute and pour over.
A plain French-Creole treatment of frogs' legs: dredge, fry, and dress with a fast garlic-parsley oil. The whole thing hinges on speed — frogs' legs are lean and small, and the sauce is finished in the same pan while the oil is still hot.
- What "hind legs" meansOnly the hind pair of a frog is eaten; the forelegs carry almost no meat. Sold today as pairs, still joined at the base of the spine, either fresh or frozen. Snip them apart or leave them joined as they come.
- Buying and quantityImported frozen frogs' legs, farmed or wild-caught, are the usual source and come graded by count per pound. Figure about 1/2 lb per person as a main course; 2 lb feeds three or four. Thaw frozen legs overnight in the refrigerator and dry them thoroughly, or the flour will slide off.
- Wild frogsIf you are catching your own, frogs are regulated in many states: taking them may require a licence and may be limited to a season. Check local rules before you go out at night with a light.
- Cooking timeSmall legs need roughly 3 minutes a side over medium-high heat, larger ones 4 to 5. The meat goes from tender to cottony very quickly. They are done when the flour coating is light brown and the flesh pulls easily from the thin leg bone.
- The oilA whole pan of olive oil at frying heat will smoke if pushed. Keep it at moderate frying temperature, around 350F, and use a plain olive oil rather than a peppery extra-virgin, which turns bitter and is wasted here.
- The sauce is the hingeMinced garlic in hot oil burns in well under a minute and turns acrid. Pull the pan off the flame before the garlic goes in, let the residual heat do the work, add the parsley last, and pour it over immediately.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper on the legs before flouring, as written, is the whole seasoning. A squeeze of lemon over the finished platter is a common addition and does not fight the garlic.
Frogs' legs reached American tables largely through French cooking, and New Orleans — with both a French kitchen tradition and bayous full of bullfrogs — treated them as a local specialty rather than an exotic one. Restaurants there served them fried and à la provençale with garlic and parsley (essentially this recipe), and commercial frog-catching supplied the city's markets from the surrounding parishes into the twentieth century. The garlic-and-parsley finish here is a persillade, the standard partner to cooking 'à la provençale'.