No. 2632

Frog Salad

Salade de Grenouilles

Have one pound of very white medium-sized frogs, cooked in a little mushroom broth, and seasoned with salt, pepper, butter and lemon juice; when cold cut the meats into three-eighths of an inch squares, and put them in a vessel with cooked artichoke bottoms, potatoes and hard-boiled eggs, all cut the same size as the frogs; season with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, and macerate for fifteen to twenty minutes. Drain the salad on a sieve, return it to the vessel, and dress it with a consistent mayonnaise (No. 606), finished with mustard and chopped tarragon; arrange it in a salad bowl, smoothing the top to a dome. Split some lobster claw meat in two, season and form into a rosette in the center of the salad; decorate around with truffles and gherkins having a lettuce heart exactly in the middle.

← No. 2631 Fish Salads Cooked Salads No. 2633 Herring Salad with Potatoes →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's cooked salads are assembly jobs: everything is cut to one size, marinated briefly, then bound at the last moment. The hinge here is the frog meat, which must be picked from the bone while warm and never overcooked.

What to buyA pound of "very white medium-sized frogs" meant dressed frogs or, more usually, the hind saddles. Frog legs today come frozen in 1 lb boxes, usually from farmed sources in Asia; thaw them in the refrigerator overnight. A pound of legs yields roughly 5 to 6 oz of picked meat.
Poach brieflyFrog leg meat is done in 5 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer and turns cottony and stringy if held longer. It is ready when the meat pulls cleanly from the thin bones; cool it in its liquid, then pick and dice.
Mushroom brothThe original assumes a kitchen with mushroom trimmings and their cooking liquor on hand. Simmer 4 oz sliced mushrooms in 2 cups water with a pinch of salt for 20 minutes and strain; use enough to barely cover the legs, with a knob of butter and a squeeze of lemon.
Artichoke bottomsThese are the trimmed, choke-free bases of large globe artichokes, boiled in acidulated water. Tinned or frozen artichoke bottoms are a reasonable stand-in; drained quartered hearts are not the same texture but will do. Cut everything, potatoes and eggs included, to the 3/8-inch dice the recipe specifies, since the salad depends on uniformity.
Macerate, then drainThe 15 to 20 minutes in oil and vinegar is a seasoning step, not a pickling one. Drain it thoroughly on a sieve, otherwise the loose vinaigrette thins the mayonnaise and the dome collapses.
"A consistent mayonnaise"Consistent here means stiff enough to hold a shape rather than a pourable sauce; make it thick and do not slacken it. Ranhofer's No. 606 is a raw-yolk mayonnaise; use pasteurised eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise finished with mustard and tarragon if you are serving anyone vulnerable.
Lobster and garnishTwo cooked lobster claws give enough meat to split and fan as a rosette. Truffle is optional as decoration; thin rounds of black olive or a few slices of preserved truffle read the same way against the gherkins.
YieldAs written this makes a first course for 6, or a light lunch for 4. Chill the assembled bowl no more than an hour, as the potato dulls the dressing quickly.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire written out at exhaustive length, with cross-references instead of repeated instructions. Frogs' legs were a Delmonico specialty, and Ranhofer is often credited with helping put them on fashionable American menus under French names. This salad shows the late-nineteenth-century restaurant habit of treating a cold dish as architecture -- uniform dice, a smoothed dome, a rosette of claw meat, truffle and gherkin around the base and a lettuce heart set dead center. The frog itself is almost incidental to the presentation: the kitchen was demonstrating that an inexpensive creature could be dressed to sit on the same table as lobster and truffles.