More Than a Great Pair of Legs

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/dining/frogs-legs-may-be-out-of-favor-but-not-flavor.html

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LES ÉCHETS, France — There was a time when frogs’ legs drowned in butter and garlic were standard fare at just about every bistro in France. Then two things happened.

First, tastes changed. With the advent of nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s, cuisses de grenouilles lost their cachet, as did country pâté, lamb kidneys in Dijon mustard sauce, duck à l’orange and profiteroles.

Second, frogs became an endangered species worthy of protection by the state. In 1980, France banned the capture, transport and marketing of live French frogs. Most frogs that end up on dinner plates here these days have to be imported, either live from places like Poland, Albania and the former Yugoslavia, or as frozen legs from Indonesia and China.

But search hard enough and you will find a believer in just about everything edible in France. I found my frog lover in Christophe Marguin, 45, a fourth-generation proprietor-chef at the hotel and -restaurant that bear his name 10 miles outside Lyon.

His establishment, painted Chinese red, opened in 1906 as a way station for travelers on the highway between Lyon and Strasbourg. Mr. Marguin’s great-grandfather pumped gasoline from a single pump; his great-grandmother prepared hearty meals with carp, pike, crayfish and frogs fished out of the family pond.

The first member of the family to attempt upscale cuisine was Jacques Marguin, Christophe’s father, who had been first apprentice to the food legend Paul Bocuse. Jacques learned all about frogs from his mother, who gave him the task of killing, skinning and cutting off the heads of the catch every day before school.

Today, the restaurant is a temple to frogs. Frog oil paintings adorn the walls. Frog figurines — in glass, china, metal, plastic and pottery — perch on display-case shelves. Stone frogs stand guard at the entrance. Green frogs have been painted on the custom-made china plates by Bernardaud. (Bernardaud’s first frogs weren’t very pretty, so Christophe went to the chinamaker’s office on the Rue Royale and watched as they were repainted.)

“Frogs are mythical, delicate creatures,” Christophe Marguin said. “They deserve respect.”

This is not the place to come if you don’t like butter, cream and lots of drink. When Mr. Marguin poured me a glass of Champagne before noon, and I said it was a bit early for me, his eyes widened as if to say, “Who is this American puritan and what is she doing here?”

He served me frogs four different ways. First came a potato galette stuffed with shredded pieces of frogs’ legs and mushrooms on a sauce of parsley, butter, garlic, almond powder, white wine and cream. Then came scrambled eggs with black caviar, chives, slivers of frog and a touch of cream. That was followed by a crusty tart filled with mousseron mushrooms and olive-shaped pieces of frog meat in a white wine sauce.

For the finale, the classic sautéed frogs’ legs in butter, Mr. Marguin invited me into the kitchen. He heated butter in a large frying pan until it sizzled and formed bubbles an inch in diameter. “You have to watch the mousse rise in the pan and turn nut-colored,” he said. “That’s the secret to success.”

Then he threw in tiny frogs whose heads, feet, skin, spine and insides had been excised. As the frogs turned crispy brown, he flipped them over one by one until they were equally done. Then he showered them with raw chopped parsley and garlic and slipped them under the broiler for five seconds.

“They taste best when eaten with your fingers,” he said. Easier said than done. It’s hard to take notes with buttery fingers, and even harder to look elegant when butter is dripping down your chin. I eventually found my rhythm, popping the frog whole in my mouth, sucking out the flesh and tossing out the bones.

Each dish was paired with its own wine, all from 2008: a Beaune Clos des Mouches by Joseph Drouhin, a Meursault Clos de la Barre Domaine des Comtes Lafon, a Domaine Pierre Amiot et Fils, a Charmes-Chambertin Grand Cru. Two very old Chartreuses followed coffee and dessert.

Mr. Marguin is a collector, and his collections extend far beyond frogs. He has framed and hung the monogrammed uniforms of many of France’s most famous chefs (which they have signed) on the wall leading to the main dining room. He has about 2,500 menus from meals served at the Élysée Palace by French heads of state going back to Charles de Gaulle. His wine cellar contains not only fine wines and spirits, including a 1967 Chateau d’Yquem, it also hold his collection of dozens of Champagne buckets and Coca-Cola, Perrier and Badoit bottles.

Then there is the underwear collection. Mr. Marguin’s father, Jacques, never liked to throw out anything. So when the stems of wine glasses broke, he used the glasses for tastings — storing them upside down. Without a base, the taster could not put down the glass and therefore had to drink its entire contents.

That led to a lot of inebriated tasters. It seems that to show their appreciation, many women left behind their bras. A clothesline of several dozen bras (lacy and racy, striped and sporty) hangs behind the tasting bar. Somewhere along the way, the men followed suit; a smaller number of boxer shorts and briefs hang nearby.

I decided it would be a conflict of interest to add to the collection. “Very creative,” I said, and moved on.

Early the next morning, Mr. Marguin and I drove two hours south to Pierrelatte in the far southwest of the Drôme. Here is France’s most important nuclear reactor and chemical industrial site. Here is also a commercial frog farm, one of several around the country, that opened for business in 2010 and is not affected by the ban on capturing frogs. It was the first visit for both of us.

The farm consists of a large prefabricated building in a field. We knew we had found the place because as we approached, we could hear the male frogs singing mating songs. They were too small to do any deep-throated croaking; they sounded more like a cross between hungry gulls and squealing pigs.

Inside were about 140 thermoplastic basins of various sizes. They are fed with water at a constant temperature, and filled with frogs at various stages of 10-month lives, from eggs to tadpoles to 50-gram adults ready for killing. The frogs are refrigerated until they don’t move. Mr. François uses a scissors to cut off their heads and feet, and a knife to skin them and cut out their guts.

“My parents are fishmongers, so I know frogs,” said Patrice François, 48, the founder of the business. “They teach you patience.”

He showed me how frogs mate. The male grasps the female under the forelegs in an embrace. He climbs on her back and reaches his arms around her waist. Group sex is normal. Another male may decide that the female is so desirable, he needs to join in. He climbs on the back of the male in an effort to overpower and dislodge him. During the embrace, the male frog fertilizes the eggs as they are laid. The mating can take up to a month, so there were several threesomes of frogs in patient, multilevel embrace.

As we watched, Mr. François’s wife, Catherine, culled the biggest frogs from a basin. “Frogs eat anything that moves, and the dominants would take over and I would be left with no frogs and no business,” Mr. François said.

Mr. Marguin, who buys frogs in various sizes from a distributor who gets them live from Albania and the former Yugoslavia, was intrigued. He invited Mr. François to a meal at his restaurant. The two of them should do business, he said.

I was hoping to parlay all this firsthand knowledge about frogs into an invitation to go gigging with my friend Ron, who owns a farm near Lynchburg, Va.

Frog gigging is a tradition in those parts. You row out onto a freshwater pond at night armed with a flashlight to stun the frogs and a pole tipped with a long, multipronged spear to catch and kill them. Back at your barn or garage (the kitchen’s too fancy for this sort of thing), you soak them in buttermilk, dredge them in flour or Shake ’n Bake, deep-fry them in vegetable oil and eat them hot with your fingers, along with a cold beer.

Ron declined my entreaty for an invitation. “This is a Southern thing,” he said. “And you have to be a good ol’ boy.”

<NYT_CORRECTION_BOTTOM> <p>This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 11, 2013

<p>An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the age of Christophe Marguin, a fourth-generation proprietor-chef. He is 45, not 46.