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Coquilles of Frogs' Legs
Neatly trim off the claws and bodies, keeping nothing but the perfect legs, of two pounds very fresh frogs' legs. Cut each leg in two and keep on a plate. Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon butter, add two tablespoons flour, stir well, pour in one gill hot milk and one gill cream. Season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil and keep hot. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add the legs, season with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon pepper and cook on a brisk fire for ten minutes, frequently tossing them meanwhile. Pour the sauce over the legs, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, mix well and cook for five minutes more. Divide the legs into six table shells, evenly dredge two tablespoons bread crumbs and divide a half tablespoon butter in small bits over them; set in the oven to bake for ten minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward gratin: frog legs sautéed, bound in a thick béchamel, then crumbed and browned in shells. The measurements are in units that have fallen out of use, and the oven temperature is left to the cook.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/2 cup hot milk and 1/2 cup cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon — meaning 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne in the sauce, which is assertively hot for a cup of sauce.
- Table shellsThese are natural or porcelain scallop shells, sold as coquille or gratin shells. Shallow individual gratin dishes or 4-inch ramekins do the same work; the point is a wide surface for the crumb crust.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature; by this point the legs have been cooked in the pan and again in the sauce, so the oven is doing little but browning. A moderately hot oven — around 400F — for the ten minutes will do, or run them under a broiler for two or three minutes if the crumbs are pale.
- Buying the legsTwo pounds of legs, bone in, is the yield for six shells. Frog legs today come frozen and already trimmed, so the claw-and-body work is usually done for you. Thaw fully and pat very dry, or they will steam rather than brown.
- Brisk fire, ten minutesTen minutes over high heat is longer than small legs want; the meat is delicate and dries out. Watch for the flesh turning opaque and pulling from the bone, then stop — a further five minutes follows in the sauce, plus the oven.
- The sauceOne tablespoon butter to two of flour is a lean, dry roux, so it thickens hard. Add the milk and cream gradually and beat it smooth; a stiff sauce is what holds the legs in the shell, but it should still coat rather than clump.
- ServingSix shells as a first course. Frog legs are eaten with the fingers, so the bones stay in — a plate for them is worth putting out.
Coquille is simply French for shell, and by the turn of the twentieth century it named a whole class of restaurant dishes: anything cooked, bound in a rich sauce, piled into a scallop shell, crumbed and browned. The form let a kitchen turn small quantities of expensive protein — crab, sweetbreads, chicken livers, frog legs — into a composed individual course. Frog legs held a settled place on American hotel and club menus of the period, said to have been supplied in large part from wild-caught bullfrogs; French-trained chefs in New York treated them as an ordinary luxury alongside terrapin and canvasback duck. The International Cook Book belongs to that milieu, and its instruction to keep "nothing but the perfect legs" is the voice of a professional kitchen with a cook to do the trimming.