Hold the mayo! When did crab cakes get so bland?

There was a time in Harford County when corn on the cob came in two basic varieties: white or yellow. The yellow corn started disappearing from roadside stands some 20 years ago. "Can't sell it, the yuppies think it's cow corn," one local proprietor told me.

Around the same time, crab cakes started getting snotty too, or perhaps I should say "phlegmy," the culprit was too much mayonnaise. To be fair, mayonnaise has been a standard ingredient of many Maryland crab cake recipes since the 1930's, but the levels were reasonable. Take the recipe on the side of the Old Bay can for example:

2 slices white bread, crusts removed and crumbled
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 teaspoons OLD BAY® Seasoning
OR OLD BAY® 30% Less Sodium Seasoning
2 teaspoons McCormick® Parsley Flakes
1/2 teaspoon prepared yellow mustard
1 egg, beaten
1 pound lump crabmeat

Two tablespoons of mayonnaise for a pound of crab meat is fine and tasty, but any more and you're getting into crab imperial territory. It used to be an easy choice: if you wanted mustardy, you ordered a crab cake, if you wanted creamy, you ordered the imperial.

Believe it or not, there was a time when Maryland crab cakes didn't contain mayonnaise at all. Here's a recipe from 1685:

To fry Crabs Take the meat out of the great claws being first boiled, flour and fry them and take the meat out of the body strian half if it for sauce, and the other half to fry, and mix it with grated bread, almond paste, nutmeg, salt, and yolks of eggs, fry in clarified butter, being first dipped in batter, put in a spoonful at a time; then make sauce with wine-vinegar, butter, or juyce of orange, and grated nutmeg, beat up the butter thick, and put some of the meat that was strained into the sauce, warm it and put it in a clean dish, lay the meat on the sance, slices of orange over all, and run it over with beaten butter, fryed parasley, round the dish brim, and the little legs round the meat.

Here's another, more recent version from the 1950's (This one comes from the University of Maryland Agriculture and Home Economics Extension Service, circa 1956, and is a personal favorite - sans onions):

1 pound blue crab meat
2 tablespoon chopped onion
2 tablespoons butter or other fat, melted
1 egg beaten
1/2 teaspoon powdered mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
Dash pepper
Dash cayenne pepper
1/2 cup dry bread crumbs

Now that's a list of ingredients that'll make a good, authentic mid-20th century crab cake. Fried or broiled? One of each please.

Photo: Falmanac