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Frog Legs, Southern Style

A Southern-style dish of frog legs cooked with butter, ham, peppers, okra, tomatoes, and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Okra and tomato work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 327 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Frog Legs, Southern Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Melt butter and sauté minced shallots.

  2. Add frog legs and cook until browned, then remove from skillet.

  3. Add diced ham and chopped green pepper; cook until ham is nearly done.

Simmer and serve

  1. Pour in chicken consomme, okra, and tomatoes; bring to a boil.

  2. Stir in rice and cook until nearly done.

  3. Return frog legs to the skillet and simmer until tender.

  4. Serve frog legs in the center of a dish with vegetables arranged around them.

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. Okra + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Shallot + okratop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

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

  4. Okra + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together250 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Frog legs
Provide the main protein, which browns first and becomes tender through simmering.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the shallots and frog legs and carries flavour.
Rice
Absorbs liquid from the consomme and thickens the dish as it cooks.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body to the simmering liquid.
Okra
Adds body and a thickening quality to the stew as it cooks.
Raw lean ham
Contributes savoury, salty flavour to the base.

The step that matters

Return frog legs to the skillet and simmer until tender. Frog legs cooked too long toughen as their proteins tighten, so they should be added back late and simmered gently only until tender while the rice finishes.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, ham, pepper, chicken, okra, tomato, rice):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, ham, pepper, chicken, okra, tomato, rice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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