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To Cook Frogs' Legs

A fried dish of frog legs coated in egg and breadcrumbs, seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

To Cook Frogs' Legs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. If not pre-prepared, carefully strip the skin from the frogs' legs and wash them in cold water.

  2. Dry the legs well on a towel or napkin.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

Coat and fry

  1. Beat the egg and season it with salt and pepper.

  2. Dip the legs into the egg, then coat them with bread-crumbs.

  3. Plunge the legs into boiling fat and fry for 5 minutes.

  4. For best results, use a wire frying basket.

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. Egg + breadtop 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 tender meat that is the main substance of the dish.
Egg
Binds the crumb coating so it adheres to the legs during frying.
Bread-crumbs or cracker-crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns in the hot fat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mild flavour of the meat.

The step that matters

Drying the legs before coating. Surface moisture keeps the egg and crumbs from sticking evenly and can make hot fat spatter. Thoroughly dry legs give a crisper, more even crust when plunged into the boiling fat.

“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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