When the Gold Rush hit California in the mid-19th century, miners swarmed over its hills like humanoid locusts, shearing the land of its vegetation in search of fortune. The newly rich, once established in San Francisco, were equally as ravenous when it came to food, and the opportunity to feed a population that would quadruple in size in 40 years brought immigrants and businessmen like Samuel Charles Coombes to the city long after the initial rush abated.

A serial entrepreneur, Coombes arrived in San Francisco from England in 1888, eager to sell fresh meat to the rapidly developing city. Locally procured red-legged frogs flew off the shelves. Priced at around $4 per dozen ($123 in today’s money), their appeal to the California nouveau riche was no doubt popularized by their association with sophisticated French cuisine — the native amphibian was dubbed “French frog” by unscrupulous dealers.

“As good and better than many gold mines,” boasted Coombes’ 1902 manual on commercial frog farming, a business he got into to keep his shop stocked.

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Live frogs is sold at a San Francisco seafood market in Chinatown. Many people believe live frogs taste better than frozen ones.

“The demand for frogs is proving to be so great, I was obliged to get a staff of men to catch them and also have the frogs shipped to me from all parts of the state,” Coombes wrote.

The hunger for these creatures proved too insatiable, and the stock of native red-legged frogs couldn’t keep up. By the time Coombes jumped into the frog farming business, American bullfrogs from the East Coast were already being imported to supplement the local supply. The first documented import was in 1896, when a frog farm in El Cerrito brought in 36 specimens from Maryland and Florida.

“Farming” in these early cases involved simply gathering up a bunch of bullfrogs and plopping them in a single pond surrounded by primitive enclosures. You didn’t even have to feed them. They often eat their young, essentially producing their own sustainable food supply.

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Bullfrog farms don’t exist in California anymore. Most shut down in the 1930s, but the left-over “merchandise” stuck around. So did California’s appetite for the amphibians. These days, approximately 2 million are imported into the state each year from farms around the world.

In the Bay Area, you’ll most often see bullfrogs at seafood markets or on menus at Chinese restaurants. (While the region’s French bistros have a much smaller presence, you’ll see sautéed frog legs — cuisses de grenouilles — there, too.)

Slippery and plump, with a cooked texture nested between that of chicken and halibut, bullfrog meat rewards the patient eater. Yes, there are bones. Deal with them like you would a peach pit: work around the center to peel off the flesh, centered on the frog’s muscular, Mr. Universe legs.

“Their meat is particularly silken, succulent and delicious,” says cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop, who has written several essential English-language books on regional Chinese cuisine. “They also have the ‘high grapple factor’ that Chinese people enjoy, which is to say that they are a little fiddly and it’s a kind of game separating bone and meat in the mouth.”

At Z & Y Restaurant, an institution of Sichuan cuisine in San Francisco’s Chinatown, chopped and braised frog legs are intertwined with fierce peppers, spongy seafood mushrooms and cucumbers in a silky broth. Stray pieces of meat — there’s a calf! — might release from the bone and bob about in the gelatin-rich liquid like pale buoys.

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At Easterly, a group of Hunan restaurants in the East Bay, the meaty legs are chopped into juicy, bite-size morsels and stir-fried with pickled red chilies.

Like fish or Dungeness crab, obsessives say that live frog, butchered right before you cook it, has an ideal taste and texture.

San Francisco chef Kathy Fang, whose family owns House of Nanking and Fang in the city, remembers shopping for bullfrogs with her family, watching her parents as they picked prime live specimens at seafood markets.

“Pork and frog were big at our home,” she told me, while beef and chicken were occasional, if not rare at the dinner table. When she was pregnant, Fang ate a lot of frog, which she praised as a good source of protein that’s also low in fat and cholesterol.

In a year or so, however, it could be harder for Fang or anyone else to make bullfrog dishes — at least in California. In December, a series of proposals approved by the state Fish and Game Commission quietly recommended a complete ban on the importation and sale of live bullfrogs.

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Environmentalists and scientists have long decried the devastating impact of American bullfrogs on the state’s ecosystem, with one wildlife expert I spoke to calling them a “plague.” Meanwhile, for........

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