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Fried Frogs' Legs, Tartare Sauce
Cut off the feet of one and a half pounds fresh, fat frogs' legs; remove any other adherings, keeping nothing but the perfect hind legs; place them on a plate, season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon white pepper, well spread all over; lightly roll them in flour, then dip in beaten egg, and finally roll them in bread crumbs. Arrange in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for six minutes. Lift them up, thoroughly drain, sprinkle a half teaspoon salt over, dress on a dish, decorate with six quarters of lemon and parsley greens and serve.
A straightforward deep-fry that assumes you know how to render and manage a kettle of fat. Two things need translating: the fat temperature the original calls "boiling," and the sauce named in the title but never given.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble violently around what is dropped into it, roughly 350-375F. Below that the crumb coating soaks; much above it, the coating colors before the legs are through.
- Six minutes is for large legsThat timing suits the big, meaty pairs the recipe calls for when it specifies "fat" legs. Smaller graded legs, common in what is sold now, will be cooked through in three to four minutes. Go by color and by the meat pulling from the thin bone.
- Buying themFrog legs are usually sold frozen where they are stocked at all, often in graded pairs. Thaw fully in the refrigerator and dry them hard on towels before seasoning, or the flour will slide off and the fat will spit.
- The tartare sauceThe title promises one and the text never delivers; sauces were often carried in a separate chapter of books like this. A tartare of the era is mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot or onion and parsley, sharpened with a little vinegar.
- SaltA teaspoon on the legs plus another half teaspoon after frying is generous by current taste, especially since much of the first seasoning ends up in the flour. Season lightly before breading and finish to taste at the end.
- Breading orderFlour, egg, crumbs, as written, and let the breaded legs rest ten minutes on a rack before frying so the coating sets and stays on in the basket.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The six lemon quarters suggest six portions; a pound and a half of legs, mostly bone, will stretch further as a first course than as a main.
Frogs' legs reached American cookbooks largely through French kitchens, where cuisses de grenouilles were long a Lenten and freshwater-country dish, and through the Creole cooking of Louisiana, where bullfrogs were taken from bayous and marsh. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they were more a hotel and restaurant dish than a home one in the United States, which may be why this recipe presents them with a frying basket and a formal garnish of lemon quarters and parsley: it reads as a plated restaurant preparation written down for domestic use. The wild trade that supplied those kitchens was largely domestic; today most legs sold in North America and Europe are imported, farmed or wild-caught in Asia, a shift that has drawn steady criticism from conservation groups.