I have a backlog of blog posts going back into May that include experiences in New England and New York as well as in some of my favorite spots in the Northwest: Oregon’s Williamette Valley, Portland, and Seattle. Yet moving to the front of the line last night was my first taste of frog.
Snails are old hat. Ate them. Like them.
But frog legs are in a culinary corner all their own and far from ubiquitous on menus in the Northwest… or anywhere else I’ve been in the last few years including China. I associate them almost exclusively with high French cuisine, but they appeared unexpectedly in among the appetizers at Syringa in Coeur d’Alene last night.
Not that Viljo Basso is your typical chef/owner of a Japanese restaurant. His name alone is hardly what you’d expect for the proprietor of an Asian establishment, and the truth is that his culinary training is both in classical French and Japanese cooking. This might explain another appetizer on Syringa’s menu: beef tongue. Like the frog legs, tongue is not normally a headliner for a Japanese restaurant… at least in this country. Neither are frog legs, but there they were just above the potstickers, poké, and tempura.
Some combination of curiosity and bravado spurred me to order them. Our server, Sara, said “They taste like chicken.”
Not so much. The texture of the meat is certainly reminiscent of stringy chicken, but the flavor of those we tried last night is almost all fish. Blythe Thimsen, my editor at Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living, announced that “they taste like cod” and declined the offer of a second leg. I don’t blame her; the curious texture/flavor disconnect is a bit disconcerting.
I worked my way through three, partly just to prove I could, but don’t feel the need to order them again anytime soon. Much of this is mental: in addition to the texture/flavor issue there is also the visual effect.
Frog legs look like chicken legs stretched out on some medieval torture device, and they somehow give the impression of being more like the parts of an animal that they are and less like something we recognize as food. This reaction would most likely go away if frog legs were served more often, but they’re not. And, as such, they will probably remain little more than a Francophile favorite for quite some time to come.
