No. 1020

Frogs' Legs Deviled

Cuisses de Grenouilles a la Diable.

Have one pound of well-pared frogs' legs; season them with salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon juice and mustard, and immerse them in melted butter, then roll them in bread-crumbs, and range them on a double broiler; besprinkle with butter, and broil over a slow fire, then dress them on a deviled sauce (No. 459).

← No. 1019 Frogs' Legs a la Poulette with Mushrooms Frogs No. 1021 Frogs' Legs Fried a la Orly →

For the Modern Kitchen

A short, blunt recipe of the kind Ranhofer wrote for cooks who already knew his kitchen. Two things need translating: the equipment and the sauce it points to.

The double broilerNot a double boiler. This is a hinged wire grill basket that clamps the legs between two grids so they can be turned as a single sheet without the crumb coating tearing away. A fish grill or any hinged wire basket does the same job over coals or a gas grill; under a broiler, a rack set over a sheet pan works if you turn them carefully.
"A slow fire"Coals burned down past their fierce stage, or a moderate broiler with the pan set 6-8 inches from the element. The point is to brown the crumbs while the thin meat cooks through — high heat scorches the coating before the joint at the thigh is done.
TimingFrogs' legs are lean and small. Three to four minutes a side is usually enough for medium legs; they are done when the meat pulls easily from the thighbone. Overcooked they turn dry and stringy, and no amount of sauce recovers them.
Sauce No. 459The cross-reference is to Ranhofer's own deviled sauce, which this page does not reproduce. Deviled sauces of the period are generally built on a reduction of wine, vinegar and shallots sharpened with mustard and cayenne, sometimes bound into a brown sauce. Any modern sauce diable, or a mustard-and-cayenne pan sauce, serves the same purpose. It goes under the legs, not over them, so the crumbs stay crisp.
"Well-pared"Trim the feet and any ragged skin, and separate very large legs at the joint. Frozen legs are the norm now; thaw them fully and pat them dry, or the butter and crumbs will not adhere.
The seasoningSalt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon juice and mustard is a marinade, not a dry rub — the melted butter carries it. A smooth Dijon-style mustard blends in best; grainy mustard sits on the surface and burns.
YieldOne pound of legs is a first course for two, or a light main for one. Ranhofer's chapter treats frogs as a restaurant entrée among many courses, so portions run small.
SourcingCommercially sold frogs' legs are farmed and imported, generally from Asia. Wild-caught frogs are regulated by state and season in much of the United States; buy from a fishmonger rather than a pond.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in several thousand numbered entries that cross-reference each other like a filing system — hence the bare instruction to dress the legs on sauce No. 459 rather than repeating it. Frogs' legs held a small but fixed place on American luxury menus of the period, imported wholesale from French practice, where cuisses de grenouilles had long been a Lenten and freshwater-fishing dish. À la diable is the standard nineteenth-century French treatment for anything crumbed and grilled with mustard and cayenne: the "devil" is the heat, and the formula was applied to chicken, kidneys, bones from the day before, and here to something considerably more delicate than any of them. That Ranhofer gives frogs their own section says less about American appetite for frogs than about how completely Delmonico's had adopted the classical French card.