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Roasted frogs seasoned with bread crumbs, sweet cream or butter, salt pork, and served with buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, draw, and stuff the frogs with seasoned bread crumbs moistened with sweet cream or melted butter.

  2. Sew them up and tie a small slice of salt pork around each frog.

Roast and serve

  1. Place in a dripping pan and baste with butter and water.

  2. Put slices of buttered toast under the frogs before serving.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Bread + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Cream + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Frogs
Serve as the main protein, cooked whole so the stuffing stays moist inside.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the cream or butter to form a moist, soft stuffing.
Sweet cream or melted butter
Adds moisture and richness to the stuffing and fat for flavor.
Salt pork
Renders fat over the frogs, adding savory flavor and moisture as it cooks.

The step that matters

Basting the frogs in the dripping pan. Basting with butter and water keeps the lean frog meat from drying out and helps the surface brown evenly as it roasts.

“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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