No. 2401

Vol-au-Vent of Frogs and Soubise Eggs

Vol-au-vent de Grenouilles et d'Œufs Soubise

Prepare the vol-au-vent crust as in No. 180. Fry colorless in a pan with butter some frogs' legs; drain, bone, and lay them in a saucepan. Boil some eggs for eight minutes to have them very hard; shell and cut lengthwise in two, then across in two; add them to the frogs' legs, and also some well-buttered soubise sauce (No. 543); butter it well, heat all very slowly, and then fill the vol-au-vent crust, placing the removed cover on top.

← No. 2400 Salt Codfish Vol-au-Vent-Large Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2402 Vol-au-Vent of Oysters →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional kitchen with a full sauce station, so this entry is mostly assembly instructions plus two cross-references. The whole dish stands or falls on the sauce.

The hinge: buttered soubiseSoubise is generally an onion-purée sauce bound with béchamel, and Ranhofer has it enriched with butter ("butter it well"). Once the butter is in, keep the pan below a simmer — his "heat all very slowly" is the whole technique, since boiling can break the emulsion and leave the filling greasy and thin.
The cross-referencesNo. 180 is puff paste baked as a hollow case with a lid (the recipe has you replace the "removed cover"); a bought 6–8 inch puff pastry vol-au-vent shell, or a round of puff pastry scored and baked, does the same work. No. 543 is the soubise: an onion sauce, the onions sweated in butter without colour and puréed.
"Fry colorless"Cook the legs in butter over moderate heat so they set white without browning. Colour would clash with a pale onion sauce.
Frogs' legsSold frozen in pairs in Asian markets and some fishmongers. The recipe specifies no quantity; the yield of picked meat off the bones is modest, so buy generously for a large vol-au-vent.
BoningDo it while the legs are still warm — the meat slips off the thin thigh and drumstick bones easily then and knits into the sauce. Cold legs shred.
The eggsEight minutes gives a fully set but not chalky yolk in a medium egg; large eggs want nine to ten. Ranhofer wants them firm enough to be quartered lengthways and crossways without collapsing into the sauce.
Assembly and timingFill at the last possible moment. A puff case holding hot sauce softens quickly, and Ranhofer has the cover replaced and the dish finished for service.
YieldRanhofer gives no yield; a large vol-au-vent was served as an entrée in the nineteenth-century sense — a course between fish and roast — and would go round a table of several, or fewer as a main dish.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how completely that kitchen worked in French terms: frogs' legs, a vol-au-vent case, and a soubise, all cross-referenced to numbered base preparations elsewhere in the book. Soubise sauce is traditionally credited to the household of the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise, though as with most such attributions the name attached to the onion purée long after the fact. Frogs' legs were not exotic in this period — American frogs were fished commercially from marshes and lakes and appeared on Delmonico's menus regularly — but they were treated as a delicate, pale meat, which is why Ranhofer pairs them with an equally pale sauce and forbids any browning. The hard-boiled egg quarters are an older device still, a way of giving substance and pattern to a light filling.