Crab cakes are one of those things that always look powerfully enticing on a menu but that I almost never order. They’re too expensive, or I’m feeling too fat to eat fried food, or—and this is usually the dealbreaker for me—there’s a good chance that they’ll be inferior. And who wants to eat expensive, fattening food that disappoints?
Making excellent crab cakes at home should be a good solution to this problem, but crab meat is so expensive that I worry about botching the frying and wasting a nice ingredient. So a few years ago I was pleased to discover these baked crab cakes in The Dean & Deluca Cookbook. They come together in a flash and bake in the time it takes you to make a salad for a light and elegant little meal. They are extremely tasty, too, at least in my opinion; because they are baked and need not withstand all that frying and flipping, they contain no breading, just an egg for binding, and are therefore rich and sweetly crabby. If you can’t live without crisp breading, these might not be the cakes for you; but if your priority is crab, you should be quite happy.
