Crab Cake Deconstruction

A few days ago I bought a package of crab cakes. Printed on the package was the assurance that the cakes did indeed contain crabmeat.

It was comforting to know that the crab cakes contained crab. But it’s also unfortunate that such a statement is even necessary. The fact that someone has to say that his crab cakes contain crab makes me wonder what’s in those other crab cakes. Cat food?

I cooked two crab cakes in my oven. During cooking, oil (probably soybean) oozed out of the cakes. The cakes were fragile and crumbly; one fell apart in the oven. Cutting into a cake with my fork, the cake appeared to be largely bread. There were a few lumps of what could have been crab but which also could have been something else. I’ve enjoyed crab cakes before, but these crab cakes appeared to be made of some kind of crab that had been bred to not taste like crab. For that matter, to not taste like anything. A designer crab, perhaps?

Curious, I looked at the list of ingredients. Sure enough, crabmeat was listed, as were pollock and whiting and a lot of other things like “natural and artificial crab flavor” and “gel fiber” (what?). There was an exhaustive list of chemicals: calcium carbonate, titanium dioxide, sodium tripolyphosphate, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, and the always-popular disodium inosinate. I could go on, but the print on the box is so tiny it strains my eyes to read it.

I guess all those ingredients have to be in it, or they wouldn’t be. Still, I miss the days when one could buy crab cakes made of crabmeat, bread crumbs, parsley, egg, mayo, hot sauce and mustard. No pollock, please. No whiting. No ingredients that only a chemist knows how to pronounce. Those days probably won’t be returning. It’s modern times, now.