Crab Cakes with Roasted Red Pepper and Garlic Aioli | Yankee Recipe Archives (1998)

To celebrate Yankee‘s 80th anniversary in 2015, The Yankee Seeker will spend the year cooking and baking from the vast and colorful Yankee Magazine recipe archives. Will the retro results of this week’s Crab Cakes with Roasted Red Pepper and Garlic Aioli hold up to today’s tastes? We can’t wait to find out! Summer is in full swing here in New England, and if you’re anything like me, that means you’re reaching out with both hands for all of the delicious seafood our coastal borders have to offer. One dish I always enjoy when out to dinner, but have never tackled at home, are crab cakes. Crisp and golden on the outside with sweet, firm crabmeat, breadcrumbs, and seasoning on the inside…maybe with a bit of fresh herbs and lightly sautéed onion…a good plate of appetizer crab cakes have sometimes been the most memorable part of my restaurant meal. So, I turned once more to the Yankee recipe archives for some at-home inspiration, and there, in 1998, I found this recipe for simple crab cakes paired with a roasted red pepper and garlic aioli.

The recipe originally came from The Barking Crab, a favorite Boston waterfront restaurant (both then and now). It appeared in a feature food story titled “Where to Find the Freshest Fish,” alongside dishes from other notable New England seacoast eateries.

I liked this recipe for its simplicity, at least where the cakes were concerned. The roasted red pepper and garlic aioli takes a little time to prepare, but you can swap it out for any accompaniment you like (even a pre-packaged one) to save time, so don’t let that stop you. This was one of three crab cake recipes we published in the 90s (shockingly, none were published at all during Yankee‘s first six decades), and I was very pleased with the results. To start, sauté a little onion, celery, and garlic. To that, add breadcrumbs (the recipe said very fine, but I used crunchy Panko), Dijon mustard, fresh herbs like parsley and tarragon, plus a little hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce. Then, add the crabmeat. The recipe called for 1 1/4 pounds, but my local grocery store sells fresh (refrigerated) canned crabmeat in one-pound cans, and they weren’t cheap, so I just went with one of those and backed off a little on the breadcrumbs.

In the end, the mixture was a bit too dry to form into patties (either because I used a coarse Panko breadcrumb or cut back on the crabmeat), so I added a heaping tablespoon of mayonnaise, and that did the trick. Chilling also helps a great deal in keeping seafood cakes from falling apart when it’s time to fry, so keep that in mind, too. I shaped the cakes, covered them in another layer of breadcrumbs, and then arranged the lot on a tray to keep cool in the fridge while I made the aioli. It called for a roasted red pepper, but the instructions were to “roast” it on the stovetop in a skillet. That was a new one for me.

While it worked, it took FOR-EVER (I had to constantly press down on the pepper with a spatula and rotate it in the skillet), and it was still tricky getting all of the skin off. If I make the aioli again, I’ll just roast the pepper in the oven the way I’m used to (instructions in this recipe), and stick the garlic cloves in there for the last 10-15 minutes.

After chilling awhile, the cakes were ready to fry. After frying for 3-5 minutes on each side in vegetable oil, I transferred the cakes to a plate lined with paper towels to absorb some of the grease, then plated them on a bed of greens with a thick drizzle of the aioli (just pour some into a zip-top bag and snip the corner off, or use a spoon). You could also serve the aioli on the side — the recipe yields a great deal of it, so feel free to drizzle and dip generously.

Simple and flavorful (especially with the roasted flavors in the aioli), these crab cakes would make a great summer appetizer or lighter main dish paired with a larger salad. Are you a fan of this favorite seaside appetizer? In the next “Yankee Seeker Meets Yankee Archives” we’ll be tackling another summer berry favorite (we need to make the most of the season while it’s here, right?), so stay tuned.

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