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Frogs Legs, Brodelaise
Cut claws off one and a half pounds fresh frogs' legs and separate legs. Finely chop together six sound shallots, half a sound green pepper, the red part of a carrot, half bean garlic, a bay leaf and saltspoon thyme. Thoroughly heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in sautoire, add legs and hash, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, and gently cook for fifteen minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile. Pour in a half gill claret and let reduce on fire to half the quantity, then add half gill each tomato sauce and demi-glace. Mix well, let gently cook for five minutes more, transfer legs to a vegetable dish and serve.
A straightforward Bordelaise-style braise for frogs' legs, written in the saltspoon-and-sautoire idiom of a professional kitchen around 1900. The main correction a modern cook needs to make is to the cooking time.
- Cut the fifteen minutes downFrogs' legs are lean white muscle on fine bones and are done in roughly five to eight minutes over moderate heat, depending on size. Fifteen minutes of tossing dries them out and loosens the meat from the bone; sear and just cook through, then let them finish in the sauce.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill is 4 tablespoons (60 ml) — that much claret, then 4 tablespoons each of tomato sauce and demi-glace. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is about 1/2 teaspoon and the thyme is 1/4 teaspoon.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan, wide enough to hold the legs in one layer. Crowding them steams the meat instead of browning it; use two pans or work in batches for a pound and a half.
- "Half bean garlic" and the carrotA bean of garlic is one clove, so use half a clove. "The red part of a carrot" means the outer orange flesh, cut away from the paler core.
- ClaretAny dry red Bordeaux or comparable dry red. It should reduce by half before the tomato sauce and demi-glace go in, or the sauce tastes raw and sharp.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock, thickened in the classical manner with espagnole. Good jarred demi-glace or a heavily reduced brown stock stands in; a bouillon cube will not, since the whole point of four tablespoons is body and gloss.
- Sourcing the legsFresh domestic frogs' legs are now rare; most are sold frozen and imported, from a mix of farmed and wild-caught sources, and should be thawed fully and patted very dry before they meet the butter. Often sold in joined pairs, they need separating as the recipe directs, and the small foot bones trimmed.
- YieldA pound and a half of legs serves two generously or three as a first course. Serve with bread or plain rice — the sauce is concentrated and there is not much of it.
The title is almost certainly a printer's mangling of bordelaise, the Bordeaux-wine sauce family, and the method here — shallots, red wine reduced by half, demi-glace — is the classic pattern, with tomato sauce and a green pepper suggesting what may have been a Creole inflection of the sort American hotel chefs of the period sometimes folded into their French repertoire. Frogs' legs were not exotica in turn-of-the-century United States dining: bullfrogs from Louisiana bayous and the Illinois River were shipped to city markets in quantity, and menus at the big hotels listed them fried, poulette, or à la Bordelaise as a matter of course. The book's vocabulary — sautoire, gill, saltspoon, "bean" of garlic, demi-glace assumed to be standing ready — suggests a readership at home in professional kitchen usage, though such terms turn up in books aimed at households too, which may be why the instructions say almost nothing about how the sauce base was made. Wild frog harvesting is now regulated by season and license in most states, and much commercial supply is imported.