After dropping from the sky in Glasgow and spending a night behind a door secured by a cupboard, my grandmother and I finally arrived at our cousins’ farm near Inverness. Grandmother and Nan immediately settled down for a good hobnob between contemporaries and shared views about short-comings of mutual relatives.

During that conversation, my grandmother found that the Scots loved their frogs as much as the French, and proposed innocently that I could certainly join them in gathering the frogs. She surmised that making me pull out the legs from life frogs would affect me enough to put me off eating frog legs for life.

The next early morning, my cousin James promised to take me along on Saturday when he would go out to get some frogs. I spent the rest of the week getting used to farm life, joining in herding the sheep into the detergent bath, learning how to pinch eggs from the hens’ nests, helping to feed the pigs, and learning to milk the cows.

Saturday at dawn, I left with James for the fields to go look for frogs. We found plenty, and our baskets filled fast with their legs. From James I picked up how to hold the frogs while pulling both their hind legs out at the same time. Like him, I would throw the rest of the frog over my shoulder, where about 20 storks followed us near enough to catch the flying frogs even before they touched the ground.

We got back to the farmhouse still early in the morning and handed over two full baskets to Nan to prepare them for lunch. My grandmother took me aside to ask how my morning had been. I was still excited about i and started to tell her in detail what we had done. She suffered through it with a straight face and finally asked: “Don’t you think it is cruel to tear out legs from an animal that is still alive?” “But grandma, the storks eat them immediately after we throw the frogs to them.” I stopped and wrinkled my row in fierce concentration. “Do you think it is stealing from the storks that we take the legs first?” My grandmother gave up at that point.

I was 12 when we went on another visit to our French cousins. After the maids had removed the plates that had contained the frog legs, Cousin Marie said to grandmother “It is awful, nowadays we have to buy them in the supermarket.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “We are not allowed to collect them ourselves anymore, it is considered inhumane. They have to be raised artificially on frog farms and the legs have to be harvested humanely and industrially.” And she blew through her nose in disapproval. “And how do the storks get the frogs?” I wanted to know. “They don’t, the frogs are thrown away.” “What a waste,” I exclaimed and never touched frog legs again.