Home › Fish › Fried Frogs' Legs
Fried Frogs' Legs
Skin and wash the legs in cold water, and dry them well on a towel or napkin. Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. For six legs, thoroughly beat up one egg, and season it with salt and pepper; dip the legs into the egg, then into dried bread crumbs or fine cracker crumbs, plunge them into boiling fat, and fry for five minutes. Use the wire frying basket for them, if you have one. Frogs' legs are served for breakfast or luncheon and for the latter they are accompanied by tartare sauce.
A straightforward egg-and-crumb fry that needs only two adjustments: fat temperature and time. Everything else stands.
- "Boiling fat" means 350–375FFat does not boil; the phrase is nineteenth-century shorthand for deep fat hot enough that a crumb dropped in sizzles and browns in under a minute. Use a thermometer and hold it at 350–375F, frying in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Five minutes is too longFrog legs are lean and thin-muscled. Small pairs need about 2–3 minutes to reach a crisp golden crust, larger bullfrog legs 4–5. Overcooked, the meat shrinks off the bone and turns stringy rather than tender.
- Six legs is one servingSix legs, three pairs -- Legs are sold in pairs, so six legs means three pairs; the recipe gives no yield, so treat that as a plate or two rather than a fixed serving. Scale the egg wash at roughly one egg per six to eight legs; a whole beaten egg goes further than the recipe implies.
- SourcingFrog legs sold today are usually imported and frozen, and come already skinned and trimmed; a good deal of the imported supply is wild-caught rather than farmed. Thaw them fully and dry them very well -- surface moisture is the main cause of breading that slides off in the fat.
- Do not skip the dryingThis is the hinge of the recipe, and the original is right to insist on the towel. Wet legs steam inside the crust and the coating separates. Pat dry, season, then coat immediately before frying.
- Lemon before the eggThe lemon juice in the seasoning step is there for flavour; the recipe gives no standing time, and there is no reason to let the legs sit in the acid, which will slowly firm the surface of delicate meat.
- Crumbs"Dried bread crumbs" here means home-dried, sieved crusts -- closest to today's plain fine dry crumbs, not panko, which is coarser. Fine cracker crumbs give a pale, sandy crust.
- The tartare sauceA period tartare is mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins, parsley and shallot or onion, sharpened with vinegar. It is not sweet; modern jarred versions usually are.
Frog legs sit under "Fish" here for the same reason turtle and terrapin often did: American and English cookbooks of the period tended to sort food by where it came from and how it cooked rather than by zoology, and anything aquatic, mild and quick-cooking tended to land in the fish chapter. Butterick's Cook Book (1911) was published by the pattern company as part of its broad program of domestic instruction for middle-class households, and its treatment of frog legs as a breakfast or luncheon dish reflects the era's hotel and restaurant fashion -- legs appeared on American restaurant and chophouse menus in the late nineteenth century, supplied largely from wild frogs and shipped to city markets. Commercial frog farming and, later, large-scale importation came after this book, and the wild American harvest is now regulated state by state, which is why the legs a modern cook buys are almost always frozen and imported rather than fresh from a marsh.