No. 371

Frog Broth and Puree

Bouillon de Grenouilles et Puree de Grenouilles

Mince half a pound of celery, carrots, turnips, and leeks; fry them without letting them acquire a color in two ounces of butter, then moisten with two quarts of chicken broth or water, and add a pound of frog's legs and hind parts, half an ounce of chervil, and two ounces of lettuce, both cut very fine. Boil all slowly for three quarters of an hour, season with a little salt and sugar, then strain through a napkin and serve in cups.

For the Puree, pound the frog meat and add to it four ounces of bread-crumbs soaked in milk and then squeezed out. When all is well pounded, dilute with the same quantity of broth as above, and strain through a tammy; a little butter and milk may be added to advantage; this puree should be served in a clear state in cups.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Two preparations from one pot: a clear broth strained off, and a purée made from the cooked frog meat. Both come from the invalid-cookery chapter, so the quantities are small and the seasoning deliberately faint.

The vegetable weight is ambiguous"Half a pound of celery, carrots, turnips, and leeks" can be read as half a pound of each or half a pound in total. Half a pound total, roughly evenly divided, gives a broth in balance with two quarts of liquid; two pounds of root vegetables would dominate the frog entirely.
Sweating, not browningThe instruction to fry "without letting them acquire a color" is the hinge of the clear broth. Keep the butter below a simmer and cover the pan; any browning turns the finished cup grey-gold instead of pale, which defeats the point of an invalid broth.
Frog legs todayFrozen frog legs, usually farmed and imported, are what you will find; depending on grade a pound may be anywhere from about four to eight pairs of legs, and the "hind parts" (the saddle above the legs) are often not included in commercial packing. Thaw fully before use. Wild-caught frogs are regulated or protected in many places, so buy farmed.
Forty-five minutes is for extractionFrog legs eaten as a dish need five to eight minutes. Here the long slow simmer is meant to draw everything into the liquid, and the meat is then pounded rather than served whole, so the time is not a mistake. Lift the legs out at about twenty minutes if you want the flesh to stay coherent enough to pick cleanly from the bones.
Chervil and lettuce go in lateHalf an ounce of chervil is a generous handful of fresh leaves, and it loses its faint anise character within minutes of boiling. Adding both the chervil and the shredded lettuce in the last ten minutes gives a fresher cup.
Napkin and tammyA napkin is a doubled square of clean linen laid in a sieve — cheesecloth or a jelly bag does the same work. A tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, worked with a wooden spoon or twisted between two people; a fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a blender followed by a fine sieve, replaces it.
Pounding the puréePick every scrap of meat off the bones before pounding — frog bones are thin, sharp and numerous. A food processor does in seconds what a mortar did in minutes; the milk-soaked, squeezed bread crumb is the binder that keeps the purée from separating.
"Served in a clear state"Read as thin rather than thick: dilute the purée with broth until it pours like heavy cream and can be drunk from a cup rather than spooned. The recipe seasons only with a little salt and sugar.
YieldTwo quarts of liquid will give something under eight cups once strained, and the purée made from the same pot a few small cups more.

A Little History

Frog broth belongs to a long French tradition of bouillons rafraîchissants — cooling broths prescribed for fever, convalescence and chest complaints, in which frogs sat alongside snails, veal knuckle and chicken as flesh considered light and non-inflammatory. Cooling herbs such as chervil, lettuce and sorrel were standard additions in that reasoning. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894, and this recipe appears in his section of broths for invalids: the household that hired a French chef also expected him to feed the sick. The dietetic theory behind it has not survived, but the technique has — a gently sweated vegetable base, a long slow extraction, a strain through linen, and the cooked flesh pounded with milk-soaked crumb into a drinkable purée.