Corn crab cakes

I've been promising Laurel for weeks now that I'd post my crab cakes recipe. I found the original in a Southern Living compilation that I checked out of the library. That's a really beautiful book, by the way. There were too many recipes that looked really good for me to try them all. But I had to do the crab cakes, because every time I go to a new restaurant I want their crab cakes, and I'm sad if their crab cakes suck, and I've been trying for years to make a good one at home, but failing.

I was failing, apparently, primarily because I was using imitation crab meat. It turns out that it is nothing at all like the real thing. I am very sad that crab costs as much as it does; the grocery bill spikes every week I give in to this recipe again.

That said, a pound of crab - although it is an appalling $20 - makes 8 or 10 good-sized cakes with this recipe. And since you refrigerate the cakes for a few hours, or up to a day, before frying them, this can actually be prepared one night and then made for dinner twice - half the first night, and half the second. I haven't done the ingredient-price-math, but I think, all told, it actually isn't that bad a hit to the wallet as a fancy dinner could be. Especially since it's two fancy dinners if it's only 2 or 3 of you - or enough for guests, without having to double it. Unless you've got a lot of guests. With a salad, a loaf of nice bakery bread, a glass of Riesling, slightly chilled... oh, God. I may never order a restaurant crab cake again; it might not measure up.

Corn crab cakes
adapted from Southern Living: 40 years of our best recipes

Part I: frying pan
2-3 tbsp. butter
1 large bell pepper (Orange, red, or yellow; I tend to buy a pack of all three, and use half an orange and half a red. Then I use the rest of the peppers in chili, or on a pizza.)
1 cup frozen corn
1 onion, chopped

Part II: small bowl, or 1-cup Pyrex measuring cup
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 egg
2 tsp. Old Bay seasoning
2 tsp. Worcestshire sauce
3/4 tsp. dry mustard

Part III: large mixing bowl
1 tbsp. minced garlic
1 cup finely crushed crackers (I use 1 sleeve of Ritz crackers, which we have on hand for eating anyway)
1 lb. fresh lump crabmeat, drained and picked (whatever that means - the can of crabmeat my supermarket carries appears to have no juices, and have no shells to pick out)

First, deal with Part I: melt the butter in the frying pan, and start sauteeing the Part I ingredients.

While they're cooking, mix together the Part II ingredients. I tend to measure out the mayo into a 1-cup Pyrex liquid measuring cup, add the eggs and spices right into it, and stir them up with a spoon.

Then, chuck the Part III ingredients into the large mixing bowl. It doesn't matter if you mix them up or not. They're just waiting there for the other stuff. When Part I is done cooking to your satisfaction, throw all the ingredients - I, II, and III - together in the mixing bowl, and mix.

(Aside: the original recipe suggests that you handle the crabmeat as little as possible, to keep the crab lumps lumpy; they break apart easily. I'm a little dubious about this. For one thing, do I really care? I like crab, and I like corn, and the closer together they are, the happier I am. Granted, their original recipe did not contain corn, so clearly they are not responsible for the consequences of my adulterations and my tastes. But for another: if the crab lumps aren't already broken and mixed uniformly throughout the crabcake, I suspect that they might provide fault lines along which the cake can break when I try to flip it. One of the other reasons my crabcake attempts fail is because I am a terrible crabcake flipper. Sometimes my salmon-cake attempts are reduced to salmon hash. It can be an ugly business.)

Get a plate or cookie sheet out, and line it with wax paper or something similar. Now start taking handfuls of crab mixture and forming them into balls of roughly the size you want your crabcakes to be; set them on the wax paper. Put them in the fridge for at least 1, but up to 24 hours. (I've actually done it for 48. They still seemed OK to me.) This is important: whether it's the lower temperature, or the time it gives the cracker crumbs to absorb the liquids and do some starchy-bindy thing, it helps the crab cakes hold together when you're frying and flipping them.

In your frying pan again, pour a layer of frying oil to cover the bottom. (Not olive oil; it smokes at frying temperatures, I hear. But canola or peanut or generic vegetable oil work.) You want enough oil in the bottom that it's not going to all get absorbed and then risk the cakes sticking to the pan when it runs out, but not so much that you're going to have a big pond to clean up afterwards. Original recipe suggests 1/2 tbsp. butter, 1/2 tbsp. oil; this seems inadequate, to me. Especially if your stove is slightly slanted and all that oil runs to one side of the pan. I don't like it. I coat the pan, so as to not run into these problems.

Heat the oil. I hear you get better browning if the oil is hot from the get-go. Then lay as many crab cakes in the oil as you can fit in your pan, but still leave room for your spatula to easily get in and flip them. (For me and my 8- or 9-inch skillet, that's four.) Don't crowd them. Flatten the cakes after you put them in the pan. (You can flatten them beforehand, even before you put them in the fridge, but I find if you do that, that they sometimes fall apart when you try to move them. I'd rather risk a little oil spit on my hand from being too close to the pan while putting them in. Maybe my priorities are backwards, I don't know.)

Here's the part I don't understand well enough to give good instructions on: cook them until their bottoms are browned, and then flip them and do it again. Sometimes I guess wrong on when it's time to flip them, and the first crab cake is ugly or broken. I usually err on the side of the premature flip, rather than on the burnt side.

Repeat until all the crab cakes you want to eat that night are cooked. Leave the others in the fridge to cook tomorrow, if there are any remaining.

Devour.