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Fried Frogs' Legs

Fried frog legs coated in a wine batter and fried in hot lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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

Marinate

  1. Marinate the frogs' legs in oil, vinegar or lemon juice, salt, and pepper for 3 hours.

Make the batter

  1. Prepare the fritter batter by mixing flour, egg yolk, lemon juice, and oil.

  2. Add enough wine to create a batter consistency.

  3. When ready to fry, beat the egg white and fold it into the batter.

Fry

  1. Dip the marinated frogs' legs in the batter and fry in hot lard for 5 minutes.

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. Vinegar + winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,493 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Forms the body of the batter that coats and crisps around the frog legs.
Egg white
Whipped and folded in, it adds air that makes the batter lighter and crisper.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the batter so it clings to the legs.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Acid in the marinade tenderises the meat and brightens its flavour.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg white. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles from the whipped white intact. Overmixing deflates them, leaving a denser batter that fries heavier.

“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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