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Fried Frogs' Legs

Fried frog legs coated in breadcrumbs and fried until crisp, served hot with tartare sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Frogs' Legs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin and wash the frogs' legs in cold water, then dry them well with a towel.

  2. Season the legs with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and lemon juice.

Coat and fry

  1. Roll the legs in fine dried bread crumbs, then dip them in the beaten egg.

  2. Coat the legs again in fine bread crumbs.

  3. Plunge the legs into boiling fat and cook for five minutes using a wire frying basket.

Serve

  1. Serve very hot with tartare sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Frogs' legs
Provide the main protein, which turns tender and white when fried.
Fine dried bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that protects the meat during frying.
Beaten egg
Acts as a glue that helps the bread crumbs stick to the legs.

The step that matters

Plunge the legs into boiling fat. The fat must be hot enough to crisp the coating quickly. If it is too cool, the crumbs absorb oil and turn greasy, and the meat may cook unevenly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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