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Fried Frogs' Legs
Prepare eighteen frogs' legs and put them in a bowl with a marinade composed of one tablespoonful each of vinegar and sweet oil and salt and pepper to taste. Mix well together in the bowl, immerse them in frying batter, plunge them singly into very hot fat and fry for five minutes. Drain, arrange on a hot dish with a folded napkin and garnish with parsley. Any desired sauce may be served with this dish.
Oscar assumes a cook who already has a frying batter working and a kettle of fat at temperature; the recipe is really a set of proportions and a plating note. A few points close the gaps.
- Sweet oilNineteenth-century American usage for olive oil, as distinct from lamp or machine oil. Any mild olive oil does the job here.
- The marinadeOne tablespoon each of vinegar and oil for eighteen legs is a light seasoning coat, not a soak; the recipe gives no standing time and reads as if the legs go from the bowl straight into the batter. If you do let them sit, half an hour is plenty, and pat them dry before battering or the coating will slide off in the fat.
- Fat temperature"Very hot fat" for battered work means 350-375F. Below that the batter drinks oil; much above it and the coating colors before the meat is done.
- Five minutes is too longThat timing suits the large legs of a market bullfrog. The farmed legs sold today are small and thin, and 2 to 3 minutes will cook them through to a golden crust. Longer dries the meat to cotton, and the meat is done as soon as it pulls easily from the thin bone.
- BatterNot given; the book leaves it to the cook. A plain fritter batter of 1 cup flour, an egg, and enough milk or beer to make a coating the thickness of heavy cream is in keeping.
- Buying themFresh frogs' legs are rare outside Louisiana and some Asian markets; frozen legs, usually imported and often wild-caught rather than farmed, are the norm and should be thawed slowly in the refrigerator and dried well. Sold by the pair, so eighteen legs is nine pairs.
- Yield and sauceNine pairs serves about three as a course, two as a main. "Any desired sauce" most likely meant something on the order of tartare, remoulade, or a tomato sauce; drawn butter with lemon and parsley also suits.
- The folded napkinFried food was set on a folded linen napkin on the platter to absorb fat and keep the crust from steaming. A rack over a sheet pan does it better, but the napkin is authentic if you are staging the dish.
Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to this book in 1896, was cooking for a New York clientele that measured sophistication in French terms, and cuisses de grenouilles were firmly in that vocabulary. Frogs' legs were not exotic in America, though: bullfrogs were taken from ponds and marshes across the country and sold in city markets, and hotel menus of the 1890s list them fried, sauteed a la poulette, and in fricassee. The plain treatment here, a light acid-and-oil seasoning, a batter, and a hot fry, is the standard hotel handling of any small delicate item in that era, and the closing line about "any desired sauce" is the mark of a kitchen with half a dozen mother sauces already on the stove. Most frogs' legs eaten today are imported from Southeast Asia, some farmed and much of the trade, particularly from Indonesia, still wild-caught.