Crab Cakes

Nosing around in the seafood case at Kroger there were some premium crab cakes on sale, two in a package, more ball shaped than flattened; they looked very good and I am a student of crab cakes. At the front of the store, oddly placed I thought, was another small case of seafood, also on sale, and I picked up a small package of cod fillets, and another and different package of crab cakes. Late last night I made a couple of codfish cakes and a couple of crab cakes from a tin of good crabmeat. I made my cakes with mashed potato as the binder, minced shallots and a few minced basil leaves. I made a simple tartar sauce, mayo, a bit of sweet relish, and a few drops of hot sauce, and fried one of each of the cakes in butter. A very agreeable late dinner, with just a crust of bread for wiping the plate clean. They were all good. The premium store-bought and my own maybe slightly better. My second winter on Cape Cod seafood cakes were the basis of my diet. I'd usually eat them twice a day. Peter Winslow and I were night fishing off the beach at Nauset and catching great quantities of cod; and every year, on my trip back from visiting my folks in Florida, I'd come home with pounds of crabmeat. My Dad, in his prime, could clean crabs faster than anyone I ever knew. I've always admired skill, in any discipline. In Key West, one of my first jobs, other than mowing yards and washing cars, was heading and shelling shrimp; 10 or 15 people standing at a bench, sluiced with sea water, heading shrimp. Some of them, in spite of the low pay, actually made a living at this, for years, and they were amazing to watch. The St. John's river drainage is Blue Crab habitat, and though they were sold cheaply as chum or bait, we caught our own. You tie a disgusting piece of rotting meat or fowl onto a string and toss it out, pull a loop of line up on the bank, and when it starts dragging away, you know a crab has taken the bait. You pull them in slowly and net them from behind. We always boiled them, eaten on a picnic table covered with newspaper, using small wooden mallets to break the claws. It was years later that I introduced Mom to crab cakes and she looked at me as if I had invented electricity. For decades after that I was known as Hippy-Son-Who-Cooks-Crab-Cakes, and I cooked thousands of them: weddings, funerals, the successful defense of a difficult dissertation, once when a dear friend walked on a (justified) murder conviction because the evidence was contaminated. I'd been a bit melancholy, but I saw the first poplar buds today and my spirits were lifted. The crab cakes helped. A mid-day bottle of stout. My feet are no longer encased in snow or mud. You get through another winter and you don't know whether it's luck or skill. Still alive and didn't lose any toes, which I credit to new tires and shocks, but there's something else going on, Jerry Lee should never have married his first cousin, and she was, what?13? I advise against any sleeping bag, without careful investigation, except in a storm. It's blowing a gale right now and I wonder how the wind, blowing through stick-trees, can create such a sound; Basho thought he should just go to sleep.

This bear hide covers
almost everything, bare skin,
I'd rather sleep.

Sure you could see that,
walk away from the bodies,
later you tremble.