Species sheet · The Edible River
Edible frog
The song of the ponds, and legs in parsley butter.
- Sautéed with garlic and parsley, Dombes-style
- In light batter, as fritters
- In cream with a dry white wine
- In French
- Grenouille verte
- Scientific name
- Pelophylax kl. esculentus
- In the water
- A frog of sunny European ponds, pools and backwaters, perched at the water's edge or on floating leaves, ready to dive at the first footstep.
- Season & buying
- In France, collecting wild frogs is tightly regulated; the legs sold in shops come almost entirely from farms or imports. The best are fresh, in spring and summer.
- Common length
- ~8 cm
- How to identify it
- Bright green to brown back with a pale line down the spine
Two grey vocal sacs that inflate at the corners of the mouth
Long, muscular, webbed hind legs
On the plate
White, tender, delicate flesh, somewhere between chicken and fish, that takes on whatever it is cooked with.
Avoid: Cooking them long: a few minutes are enough, beyond that the flesh dries and clings to the tiny bones.
The 'kl.' in its name stands for klepton: it is a hybrid that steals a genome from a parent species every generation in order to breed.
In Umay recipes
One Umay recipe calls for it.
