Few prepared foods vary so dramatically in quality and price as crab cakes. A five-dollar-or-less one likely will be made of little filaments of crab amid a mass of seasoned breading, and it probably will be deep-fried. Along the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, it is not uncommon to pay more than $20 for a crab cake that combines maximum crab and only enough filler to impart a wink of noncrab texture, convey the spice, and frame the meat from which the cake is made. The filling will be so negligible that when you eat one, you may find yourself believing that the sphere on your plate is all crab and nothing but crab, somehow raised to stratospheric succulence by the process of being mounded together and cooked.
Jumbo lumps make Chesapeake Bay crab cakes the best.
Although there is an inarguable pleasure about a fried crab cake’s crunchy exterior breaking and giving way as your teeth sink into its moist insides, the best ones are not fried. They are broiled—only long enough for the meat to warm and for the surface of the mound to develop a gossamer gold crust. The crust is thin enough to clearly show the big white nuggets of crab that compose the cake, some of them so large that they defy dispatch by a single bite. There are Maryland cooks who insist that good cakes should contain at least some claw meat and backfin body meat, which tend more toward shreds than chunks, but connoisseurs prefer cakes made of nothing but jumbo lumps, the formal name for the choicest meat, picked from the hind leg area of the blue crab. Jumbo lump crab is costlier (as are the crab cakes made from it); these large pieces possess the silky weight that makes Maryland’s beautiful swimmers the stuff of culinary legend.