“There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.” ~H.L. Mencken
I want to start by writing that I love crab cakes! I grew up eating them, and after shrimp, crab had always been my favorite seafood. I still love it although I’m not sure where exactly crab ranks right now among seafood I choose to eat.
Definitely top three or five, though. Crab meat will always be a favorite.
Not in this recipe, though, as this recipe isn’t going to be among my favorites in this year of the Cook the 40 Challenge, or any challenge year. I guess Baltimore-style crab cakes aren’t my thing.
Sorry, Andrew Zimmern!
Cook the 40
Why take on Food & Wine’s best-ever recipes from their forty years in publication? Because if you’ve been paying attention, you know that’s one of the things I’m doing this year!
Besides, I’m hoping that taking on these 40 recipes will also add some fun and new favorite foods to my life. If even half of them end up being tasty, this will be a worthwhile cooking endeavor.
And yes, even though I’ve already confessed above that this recipe won’t be a favorite of mine, Peter did love it, and I did make it and try it, and so the time spent in the kitchen with the recipe was still worthwhile.
40 Years of Food & Wine
According to the September 2018 anniversary issue of Food & Wine, and editor Hunter Lewis, https://twitter.com/notesfromacook?lang=en, what makes a good recipe is it being delicious, of course, and (I think even more important sometimes) the best recipes “tell a story worth repeating.” Well said, Hunter.
What does the story of me making this recipe tell? I guess that I like Louisiana-style crab cakes a bit more than other styles (or at least this recipe’s style).
Recipe Number Thirteen
I was very much looking forward to making this recipe. One, because it’s a crab cake recipe, and two, because Andrew Zimmern! I love Andrew Zimmern.
My own personal eating philosophy is much like his. I’ll at least taste something once or twice or maybe even a third time; although if he won’t taste it, I might stay away from it. After all, he tries everything and just about anything and if he stays away from something because it smells too bad, then maybe it shouldn’t be eaten.
(Note: This eating philosophy—if you will—pretty much took hold after I saw an episode of Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods where he wouldn’t or couldn’t eat the durian fruit. He said it was the worst thing he’d ever smelled. Yikes, I thought. If Andrew won’t eat it, maybe I shouldn’t attempt it either.)
Prepping to make crab cakes… 
…most important, the crab meat. It was good!
Let’s Get Cooking
This recipe wasn’t too complicated to make. I did change it up a bit so Peter could eat it (he’s a keto-guy, if you recall) by using pork rinds instead of crackers for the binding. I have done this before for all kinds of fish cakes, meatballs, meatloaf, all sorts of foods. It always works out well, and it worked out well this time too.
Speaking of frying and fried foods…
Where Was I When This Recipe Was Published in 2012, What Was I Doing and Where Did I Go?
As Food & Wine was publishing this recipe in 2012, I was living in New Braunfels, had just started a new job, and we did indeed take a few trips that year.
In fact, 2012 was a great year of traveling with our dog, Liberty.
We drove up to Indiana in July and ate all kinds of great fried gas station foods one might expect you’d eat on the road while traveling with a dog. (Because you can’t enter many restaurants with a big dog.)
In Michigan City, Indiana, we spent several lazy days on the beach of Lake Michigan and ate all sorts of food one might eat on the beach—like pizza!
Pizza? Really!
Little Giant Pizza in Michigan City delivers to the beach! 
A beautiful sunset over the lake.
In 2012, we also drove all over Texas for Elda Fest!
What’s Elda Fest, you ask? Well, it’s basically how I celebrate my birthday month in July.
Road trips, gas station food, my dog in the backseat and open highways before me. It’s a great time!
Long live Elda Fest!
Oh, and the Texas State Fair finally saw me make a presence in 2012!
(Yep, I had never been. Born in Texas, a proud Texan, but I had never been. It was so sad but 2012 finally ended that sadness!)
How was it? It was epic, it was fried, it was epically fried. I can’t wait to do it again.
(Hint, hint: I’m getting another corny dog—or two or three or four—again this year. And yes I will be blogging about it.)
Deep fried bacon! 
Deep fried deep-dish pizza, deep fried garlic butter and deep fried jambalaya.
It was worth the wait.
Deep Fried Heaven
All in all, 2012 at the Texas State Fair (and all the road trips, really) were like visiting parts of fried heaven. Deep fried heaven. Which should be what real heaven is all about anyway.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll deep fry the next crab cakes I make…
Gettin’ Crabby Wit It…
Why didn’t I like the recipe? Not deep fried? No. Well actually I don’t know, it wasn’t that this recipe was horrible, it just was not my kind of crab cake. It didn’t have enough breading and maybe a little too much mayonnaise. If someone served them to me at their house, I’d happily eat them, and I did eat everything on my plate on this night. So there is that.
Oh, and again, Peter really loved them! So, it was indeed a worthwhile cooking endeavor.
And I’m sure I’d rather eat even the worst crab cake known to anyone on the East Coast instead of a stinky durian fruit…
Thank you for that, Andrew.
Elda XO
For more information about this crab cake recipe, click here to be taken to the Food & Wine link: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/baltimore-style-crab-cakes
Enjoy + happy cooking!
