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Vol Au Vent of Frogs' Legs
Prepare and keep hot a vol au vent. Trim off feet from one and a half pounds very fresh frogs' legs. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add the legs. Season with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon cayenne, gently mix with fork and cook five minutes, add four sound very finely chopped shallots, mix well and cook six minutes more, occasionally tossing meanwhile. Add one good tablespoon flour, stir well, then moisten with a half gill sherry, one and a half gills hot milk and a half gill cream, adding six sliced canned mushrooms; mix with the fork and cook five minutes more, add a half teaspoon chopped chives, mix lightly and cook two minutes longer. Dilute one egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and half ounce good butter and add to the frogs' legs, continually tossing while heating without boiling for two minutes. Place the vol au vent on a hot dish, fill up with the preparation, place the cover on and serve.
A Delmonico-style fricassee of frogs' legs bound with an egg-yolk liaison and served in a puff pastry case. The measurements are pre-metric restaurant shorthand, and the cooking times reflect an era that cooked everything longer than we would.
- The hinge: never boil after the liaisonOnce the egg yolk, cream and butter go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer. Two minutes of gentle tossing off direct heat is enough; a boil scrambles the yolk and the sauce breaks into grains.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). So half a gill of sherry is 1/4 cup, a gill and a half of hot milk is 3/4 cup, and half a gill of cream is another 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so the cayenne is assertive but not punishing.
- The vol au ventA vol au vent is a tall puff-pastry case with a lid, not a dish. Frozen all-butter puff pastry works: cut a base and rings, stack, and bake at 400F until risen and dry inside, then hold in a warm oven. A single 8-inch case or four individual ones both suit this quantity.
- Sourcing the legsFresh frogs' legs are rare outside specialist suppliers; frozen imported legs are the norm and should be thawed slowly in the fridge and patted very dry, or the butter will steam rather than sear. A pound and a half untrimmed is roughly the right amount for four servings inside pastry.
- Total cooking timeAs written the legs get twenty minutes of heat (eighteen before the final liaison). Frogs' legs are lean and fine-grained and are done in six to eight minutes total; longer and the meat shrinks off the bone and goes stringy. Cook the shallots and flour base with the legs only briefly, or hold the legs aside while the sauce thickens and return them at the end.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms were a standard restaurant convenience of the period and carry a particular soft, slightly metallic character. Sliced fresh button or cremini, sweated in butter first to drive off water, give a cleaner sauce.
- BonesFrogs' legs are served on the bone and the small bones do not soften. Either warn diners, or pull the meat from the thighs and drumsticks after the initial cooking and finish the boneless meat in the sauce, which suits a filled pastry case better.
- ServingFill the case at the last moment; the sauce softens pastry within minutes. Serves four as a first course, two as a main.
Frogs' legs in a cream sauce were a fixture of the French repertoire that American hotel kitchens inherited wholesale, and this recipe carries the marks of that trade: shallots, sherry, a flour roux, and a final liaison of yolk and cream, the classic finish for a fricassee "a la poulette." The vol au vent -- the name translates literally as "flight in the wind," and the usual explanation, that it refers to the lightness of the risen puff pastry, is traditional rather than documented -- is often credited to the early nineteenth-century Paris kitchens of Antonin Careme, though the attribution is not firm, and it became the standard vessel for any rich, saucy ragout worth showing off. In the United States frogs' legs were not exotic so much as regional -- the marshes of the Midwest and the South supplied them in quantity, and hotel menus of the period list them freely -- which is why a dish that looks thoroughly Parisian sits comfortably in a book surveying "The World's Kitchen" for American cooks.