Last week I found a box of frozen crab. I thought at first it was unopened, but one of the packets was missing. I knew I wanted to make crab cakes, but I only had 4 oz of crab, enough for about two cakes. I had found one frozen crab cake once while dumpstering but after taking it home I found that it tasted terrible for reasons I could not quantify, so I hoped that there was not something terribly wrong with the crab I was using. I started by making tartar sauce while the crab was thawing.

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Tartar sauce is pretty much just mayonnaise (I used vegan mayo and there is no discernible difference) with pickles in it, plus some lemon juice, dill*, and pepper*. The dumpstered pickles I had were a surprising find: absolutely no labeling on the jar, and the pickles were mildly sweet with fine threads of onion mixed in. They were really some of the best pickles I’ve ever had, and I normally only like sour dills. Which are also the sort of pickles that normally go in tartar sauce. To compensate, I added a little preserved lemon and a little extra dill. Since I had made about half a cup of tartar sauce, I also used it instead of the mayo in the crab cakes.

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I used a recipe by Adam on Inspired Taste, and quartered it, because Adam’s recipe calls for a full pound of crab. I substituted some large, bland whole grain crackers for the saltines, and blue cheese mustard for the Dijon mustard. This was mixed together with worchestershire sauce, chives from my window, egg, and the crab. I left the mixture to rest for about an hour.

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I used about half an egg (a quarter of an egg seemed too difficult to measure) in the crab cakes, and fried the other half to eat with some Dubliner Irish cheddar, pomegranate, wheat crackers and dried figs while waiting for the crab cakes to be ready to cook. I only have one egg left, and if I need more in the next few weeks I’ll probably have to buy them.

I formed the mixture into two balls and fried them in Crisco*, and added a pat of butter** when flipping them. I burnt the bottoms, but they still turned out very good and exactly what a crab cake ought to be. It is likely that the crab cake I found, now that I think of it, had not gone bad, but was simply never good and was probably mostly corn.

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Served with lemon wedges, tartar sauce, and a little Old Bay***. The preserved lemon is a nice addition to the tartar sauce.

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*Store bought

**Store bought, because the only dumpstered butter I have left is cinnamon sugar, which I did use to fry a sliced muffin

***I have no idea where this came from, all I know is that it doesn’t belong to my roommates