Pan-Fried Crab Cakes, Traditional-Style

I cooked at seafood restaurants for three years in high school, and I made a damned fine crab cake. But when I went to make them recently, I realized I no longer knew our old recipe, so I had to try to rebuild it from the ground up. Based on rough memory and some experimentation, I worked up this recipe that I and everyone who had them thought was pretty damned good. These are simple — just enough to make them solid, and none of the extra crap you find in a lot of recipes on the net — which means you can actually taste the crab, and it’s delicious. Buy good, fresh crab, please!

Ingredients

If you have unshredded crab meat (that is, in chunks like it was just pulled out of a crab) skip the white on BOTH eggs (e.g. use two yolks) , or it may be runnier than you’d like. Mix everything together. It should be fluffy but compact well when you squeeze it. There’s some hand work here I think is important but which I can’t describe very well: basically, make a big ball, squeeze it firmly with two hands, turn it a bit in your hands, squeeze more, and repeat. Gradually compact it down from a ball to a cake. Don’t make a thin patty; you’ll be better off if your cake is only about twice as large in diameter as it is tall, but also relatively flat on the top and bottom so it fries well.

Put enough vegetable oil in a pan to create a good solid layer on the bottom, but not a deep pool, and heat it up to medium-high. Fry the cakes just until crispy and brown on the bottom, then carefully flip and repeat. If these were done in a frialator you’d want to give them good drip time over the heat, letting them sit in the basket for at least solid minute before plating them (this is the key to good deep frying of anything, otherwise they taste greasy and get soft rather than staying crispy). We don’t really have that option at home without rigging up a complicated system of some sort (cooling rack?), so at the very least least pat them firmly but carefully with paper towels.