No. 2890

Frog Omelet

Omelette aux Grenouilles

Saute some large frogs in butter, bone and lay the meats in a sautoir, adding well-buttered allemande sauce (No. 407) and soubise sauce (No. 543), half of each. Fill and finish an omelet the same as the parsley omelet (No. 2903), and pour around half supreme sauce (No. 547) and half soubise sauce, keeping it rather thin.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in shorthand for a professional brigade: three mother-sauce derivatives are named by number and assumed to be standing ready. Cooked at home, this is really a filled French omelet with a creamed frog-leg ragout, and the sauces are the whole job.

FrogsRanhofer's "large frogs" probably means whole dressed frogs rather than the trimmed pairs of legs sold today, usually frozen; the recipe gives no quantity, so judge by how much filling the omelet needs. Thaw fully, pat very dry, and sauté in butter 3-4 minutes a side until the flesh pulls from the bone, then pick the meat off in pieces.
Don't overcook the meatFrog is lean and fine-grained and goes cottony past the point where it leaves the bone. Sauté it, pick it, and hold it in the warm sauce off the heat rather than letting it stew in the sautoir.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan; any wide skillet or sauté pan does. It is used here only to bind the picked meat with the sauce, so choose one just large enough to coat it.
Allemande sauceVelouté (blond roux with veal or chicken stock) finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and lemon, then "well-buttered" means whisking in cold butter off the heat. It must not boil after the yolks go in or it will curdle. A modern chicken velouté enriched with yolk and butter is the practical substitute.
Soubise sauceOnions sweated in butter without colouring, cooked soft, puréed and combined with béchamel, then strained. Half allemande, half soubise for the filling; half suprême, half soubise for the sauce poured around.
Suprême sauceChicken velouté reduced with mushroom-flavoured chicken stock and finished with cream. Ranhofer's instruction to keep the surrounding sauce "rather thin" matters: it should pool and flow around the omelet, not sit on it.
The omelet itselfRanhofer sends you to No. 2903, the parsley omelet, for the method: a French omelet cooked fast in hot butter in a small pan and rolled over the filling, then turned out seam-down. Soft and pale, not browned or set firm. Consult No. 2903 for the egg count and details.
YieldAs written the recipe describes a single omelet; scale up if you want more. Make them one at a time in an 8-inch pan; a large multi-portion omelet will not roll cleanly around a wet filling.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is his 1,000-plus-page record of that repertoire, cross-referenced by number the way a working chef would use it. Frogs' legs were a genuine luxury item on American menus of the period rather than a novelty: Delmonico's and its imitators served them fried and poulette, and the supply is generally thought to have come largely from wild-caught bullfrogs shipped to city markets. The omelet is a good illustration of how the book thinks: a fashionable ingredient, boned and bound in a yolk-thickened velouté, wrapped in eggs, and framed by a second sauce plated around the outside, so that a single dish draws on four separate numbered preparations. Ranhofer, who was French-trained, plainly saw no need to apologise for the ingredient.