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Stewed Frogs' Legs
Melt half an ounce of butter in a saucepan on the fire, and in it brown one chopped onion, about one ounce of raw ham cut into dice, half a green pepper pod cut small, half a tablespoonful of salt, and one teaspoonful of pepper; moisten with one quart of white broth or consomme; add a tablespoonful of rice, six sliced gumbos and one sliced tomato, and cook thoroughly for about twenty minutes. Add a quarter of prepared frogs' legs five minutes before serving. Turn out on a dish and serve. If desired, one green pepper and two tomatoes may be substituted in place of the gumbo.
Lobster, American Style Procure two good sized freshly boiled lobsters and split them, removing all of the meat very carefully, and cut it up into pieces about an inch in length; and have in readiness a pan on top of a range half full of good olive oil, and when the oil has become very hot add pieces of the lobster. Chop very fine one peeled onion, one green pepper, and half a peeled clove, some sound garlic, place it with the lobster and cook for five minutes, stirring all the time; season with a pinch of salt and half a saltspoonful of red pepper, to which add half a wineglassful of white wine. After two minutes' reduction add one gill of tomato sauce and a medium sized peeled tomato, cut into small dice. Continue cooking for ten minutes, gently stirring the while, then pour the whole into a hot dish or tureen and serve.
Two dishes run together on this page: a small okra-thickened stew finished with frogs' legs, and a lobster sauté in the Creole-tinged "American style" that Waldorf menus favored. Both are quick pan dishes, and the main work is translating a handful of 1890s terms.
- Gumbos are okra"Six sliced gumbos" means six okra pods, sliced into rounds. They are the thickener here; twenty minutes of simmering is what breaks them down. The alternative given at the end — one green pepper and two tomatoes — produces a much thinner stew.
- "A quarter of prepared frogs' legs"The unit is missing in the original and is genuinely ambiguous: a quarter of a pound is the likeliest reading, though a quarter-dozen (three pairs) is possible. For a quart of broth, 4 to 6 oz of legs is sensible. "Prepared" means skinned, trimmed at the joint, and rinsed, as they come from a fishmonger.
- Five minutes is deliberateFrogs' legs are lean white muscle on fine bone and go stringy with long cooking. Slipping them into the simmering broth for the last five minutes is correct; do not braise them alongside the rice.
- White brothA pale unroasted stock — veal or chicken made without browning the bones. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark brown beef stock, which will overwhelm the okra and the frog.
- Check the seasoning downHalf a tablespoon of salt and a full teaspoon of pepper go into a quart of already-salted broth with cured ham. Start with half of each and correct at the end.
- Old measures in the lobsterA gill is half a cup, so a gill of tomato sauce is 4 fl oz. A saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon, making half a saltspoonful an eighth of a teaspoon of red pepper. A wineglassful is roughly 2 fl oz, so half of one is about 1 fl oz, or two tablespoons.
- A garbled line"Half a peeled clove, some sound garlic" most likely stands for half a peeled clove of sound garlic — no more than half a clove's worth.
- Hot oil and wet lobsterA pan half full of very hot olive oil will spit violently when cooked lobster meat goes in. Pat the meat dry and use enough oil to film the pan generously rather than half-fill it; the dish is a sauté, not a deep fry.
- YieldThe stew will stretch to about two main servings, or four as a first course. The lobster, from two good-sized lobsters, serves two generously.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, was not a cook by trade but assembled this 1896 volume from the hotel's kitchen practice, and pages like this one show how thoroughly French technique had absorbed American regional ingredients by the 1890s. Frogs' legs — cuisses de grenouilles, long a French delicacy and a standard of the fashionable New York bill of fare, priced as a luxury — were by then supplied to eastern hotels partly from inland American marshes. Here they are dropped into what is essentially a small gumbo: okra, tomato, green pepper, rice and a little cured ham, a Louisiana formula that Northern hotel kitchens took up, still calling okra pods by the older name "gumbos." The lobster following it carries the label "American style," a familiar nineteenth-century restaurant term for lobster cooked with oil, garlic, tomato and white wine; the dish is usually traced to Parisian restaurants of the 1860s, and whether the name should be à l'américaine or à l'armoricaine, for Brittany, has been argued ever since.