Then French chef George Auguste Escoffier delighted the Prince of Wales with a plate of chilled bull frog legs in London's Carlton Hotel. Escoffier called his creation "Les Cuisses de Nymphes," or The Thighs of the Dawn Nymphs. The year was 1908.
French frogs were now sexy and in trouble.
The 1977 crackdown on commercial harvesting forced French buyers to travel behind the Iron Curtain, where a motivated huntsman twitching for hard currency could bag 800 Communist frogs a day. One by one, the frog-producing countries began imposing export quotas, finally leaving unregulated slicing and dicing in the hands of Vietnam, China, Taiwan and Indonesia.
Back at the table, Gillet comes clean and says it's darn hard for a first-time frog eater to taste any difference between a fresh French mute and a frozen Bengali bull. "The secret of perfect preparation is the sauce, even if a few toads end up on your plate," she says.
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