Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Broiled Frogs' Legs
Broiled Frogs' Legs
Prepare eighteen frogs as follows: Lay the frogs on their backs. Make a long incision from the neck along the side of the belly; make another at right angles across the middle of the belly, dissect cut the entrails and cut away the head, leaving only the back and legs. Skin the frogs and chop off their feet, wash them thoroughly and blanch in scalding salted water. Then lay the hindquarters on a dish and pour over two tablespoonfuls of sweet oil, seasoning with salt and pepper and a little lemon juice. Roll the frogs around several times in this seasoning, place on a broiler and broil for four minutes on each side. Take them off, arrange on a hot dish and serve with a gill of maitre d'hotel sauce poured over.
A straightforward broil once the butchery is out of the way — and no modern cook needs to do the butchery, since frogs' legs now come dressed. The points below cover the archaic measures and the two places the original is thin on detail.
- Buy them dressedFrogs' legs are sold skinned and trimmed, fresh or frozen, at Asian markets and better fishmongers. Eighteen frogs means eighteen pairs of hind legs, roughly 2 to 3 lb, serving six as a first course or three or four as a main. Thaw frozen legs overnight in the refrigerator and pat them dry.
- Sweet oilIn nineteenth-century recipes "sweet oil" means olive oil, "sweet" indicating fresh rather than rancid. Use a mild olive oil rather than a peppery finishing one.
- A gillHalf a cup. That is a generous amount of maître d'hôtel butter for eighteen pairs; a third of a cup is plenty unless you want it pooling on the platter.
- Maître d'hôtel sauceSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. It is not a cooked sauce; here it is melted and poured over the hot legs, as the recipe directs.
- Two tablespoons of oil is not enoughFor eighteen pairs you want closer to a quarter cup, enough to coat every joint. The legs are lean and dry out fast under direct heat, and the oil is the only thing standing between them and the broiler.
- The blanchScalding salted water firms the flesh and rinses away any muddiness; the original gives no time, but a brief dip of thirty seconds to a minute rather than a simmer suits it. Drain and dry the legs completely or they will steam rather than brown.
- Four minutes a sideThat suits large legs over live coals. Under a modern broiler set close to the element, small to medium legs are done in two to three minutes a side — the flesh turns opaque white and pulls back from the thin bone. Overcooked frog goes stringy and dry in the same way as overcooked chicken breast.
- ServingServe immediately on a warmed platter; the meat cools quickly on those thin bones.
Frogs' legs were a fixture of grand American hotel cooking in the 1890s in part because they read as French. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and the book carries frogs' legs in several treatments alongside this plain broil with maître d'hôtel butter. The supply was domestic and largely wild: American bullfrogs were hunted commercially in the marshes of the Midwest and the South and shipped to city markets on ice, which is why a cookbook of this period assumes the cook will receive whole freshly killed frogs and gives dissection instructions no modern reader needs. Farming attempts and, later, large-scale imports from Asia displaced that trade in the twentieth century, and wild harvest is now regulated by season and licence in most states.