The French tend to translate the disparaging anglophone term for French people “Frogs” as mangeur de grenouilles (frog-eaters). I’m not sure whether it isn’t based more on alliteration than dietary preferences but there’s no denying that most English-speakers consider eating amphibians a bit odd. Personally, I’m ready to eat almost anything that won’t kill me but I’ve been learning that I should discriminate a bit on this question.
An ad in the regional free paper announces “I buy frogs’ legs, especially those from the Haut Doubs [a mountainous area north of here, which is rich in rivers and waterfalls]”.
The advertiser is after the grenouille rousse, which, despite apparently being called the common frog in English, is a protected species. In the 1980s so many frogs were caught for food in Europe that they were in danger of extinction.
It may be caught or bred for food but in limited quantities (850,000 a year may be bred in Franche-Comté, the region which covers the Jura). It is prized for its taste of hazelnut. Make sure you eat at restaurants that specify that the frogs are local, Le Progrès newspaper warns.
Because your frogs’ legs may come from the other side of the world. Every week a plane touches down at Geneva carrying a cargo of live frogs and, concerned officials point out, they are not grenouilles rousses. They appear to be transported in string sacks. I wonder if there has ever been a mass breakout, with thousands of the little fellers hopping around the hold.
Nowadays most of the frogs’ legs imported to the EU – 4,520 tonnes between 2011 and 2020, according to Eurostat – come from south-east Asia: 74% from Indonesia and 21% from Vietnam, with 4% coming from Turkey and 1% from Albania. India and Bangladesh were the biggest suppliers in the 1990s but the trade led to a collapse in the frog population, which in turn led to a proliferation of mosquitoes and other pests and thus an increase in the use of pesticides.
A study this year found that 58 species are threatened with extinction by the trade, which it described as of “extreme cruelty”, with a knock-on effect for the environment. It called on the European Union to “take immediate action” to tighten its control of its imports.
You don’t see frogs’ legs on the menu in Paris very often but during the season – end of January to the beginning of May – they pop up in regions rich in rivers and lakes. Three million frogs are eaten every year in Franche-Comté, not counting those caught by poachers or the owners of ponds or lakes.
They’re not easy to farm. Given that they eat insects, the farmer can only try to attract their food to the ponds, which, in any case, they tend to leave for the woods when it is not mating season (I have narrowly missed stepping on some when on my walks in the forest). There are about 80 frog-farmers in Franche-Comté, fewer than 10 of them in the Jura.
So, for both gastronomic and environmental reasons, local good, imported bad. A local restaurant offered cuisses de grenouilles menus last spring. I was tempted but didn’t go. After all, gout de noisette or not, it’s really the sauce that provides the flavour and you can serve that with other dishes – snails, for instance.
