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Frogs' Legs, Poulette
Clip off with a pair of scissors the claws of one and a half pounds fresh frogs' legs. Neatly wash and dry well. Heat up in a sautoire half ounce butter. Add the frogs' legs and season with a good half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper. Mix with a fork and gently cook for five minutes. Then add four sound, very finely chopped shallots. Mix well again and cook for six minutes more; add one good tablespoon flour, stir well, moisten with half gill sherry, one gill hot milk and half gill cream, adding six sliced canned mushrooms. Mix again with a fork and let cook for five minutes more. Add half teaspoon chopped chives, lightly mix, cook for two minutes longer. Dilute one egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and half ounce good butter; add to the frogs' legs, continually toss while heating for two minutes without boiling. Pour into a chafing dish or a soup tureen and serve.
A classic sauce poulette — flour-thickened pan sauce finished with an egg-yolk-and-cream liaison — applied to frogs' legs. The one rule is in the last line: once the yolk goes in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle into scrambled egg.
- The liaisonBeat the yolk with the tablespoon of cream and the butter, then add it off the direct heat and swirl the pan as it thickens. Hold it below about 180F; if the surface breaks into a simmer the yolk sets and the sauce grains.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is 1/4 cup, a gill of hot milk is 1/2 cup, and half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons of cayenne a full half teaspoon — aggressive by modern taste, and worth starting at a quarter.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan with a lid, roughly what we would call a 10-inch sauté pan or a shallow saucier. The straight sides matter here because the dish becomes a sauce rather than a fry.
- Total cooking timeThe steps add up to about twenty minutes over heat, which is far more than frogs' legs need — they are lean and turn cottony and dry. Sear them for two to three minutes, lift them out, build the sauce with the shallots, flour, sherry, milk and cream, then return the legs for the last two minutes to finish in it.
- Buying the legsFrogs' legs are sold in pairs, usually frozen, and a pound and a half is roughly a dozen pairs. Thaw fully and dry them hard: wet legs steam instead of colouring. Snipping off the small claws with scissors, as directed, is still the tidiest approach.
- Canned mushroomsSix sliced canned mushrooms were a common pantry convenience of the period. Two or three ounces of fresh button or cremini, sliced and cooked with the shallots until their water has gone, gives more flavour and no tinny note.
- SherryUse a dry or medium-dry sherry — fino, amontillado — and let it reduce for a moment before the dairy goes in, or the sauce tastes raw and sharp.
- Yield and serviceA pound and a half serves two generously or three as a first course. The chafing dish in the instruction is a serving vessel kept warm over a spirit lamp; a warmed shallow bowl does the same job, and the dish should go to the table immediately since the yolk-bound sauce will not stand.
Sauce poulette is one of the old French kitchen's white sauces — a velouté loosened with mushroom or cooking liquor, sharpened with shallot and herbs, and bound at the last moment with egg yolk and cream. It was applied more or less interchangeably to tripe, mussels, sweetbreads, calves' feet and frogs' legs, and the name is generally traced to poule, the classic version being built on a chicken-based velouté. Frogs' legs carried a particular cachet in American restaurants of the early twentieth century as a marker of French cooking. Canned mushrooms were a routine pantry item of the period, taken for granted even in a self-consciously continental recipe.