IFAS’s Scott Angle shares a favorite family recipe

by Barbara Drake (MFA '04)

Observed annually on March 9th, National Crabmeat Day is the perfect occasion to celebrate this crustacean’s tasty goodness – best savored in traditional crab cakes.

If you’re looking to cook up a batch of these delicacies, get valuable insider’s tips from this video from Florida Sea Grant’s “Seafood at Your Fingertips” series, featuring UF’s own Dr. Scott Angle and his family-inspired recipe.

The UF/IFAS senior vice president grew up in the Chesapeake Bay region, where crab cakes originated, and spent his summers crabbing in the local rivers and estuaries. He fondly remembers bringing his catch home on Sunday afternoons for family get-togethers, where the grown-ups would pick over steamed crabs and wash down the succulent morsels with National Bohemian beer, or “Natty Bo,” as it’s known in Baltimore. (“The kids would have root beer,” he says.)

Now that he’s older, Angle says he prefers the “lazy” route of buying fresh lump crab meat and fashioning it into crab cakes using his simple recipe, below. He says these are very similar to the award-winning crab cakes made in his brother’s restaurant in Baltimore.

Angle isn’t a purist, he says, when it comes to crab cake recipes. Spices and variations are fine if you feel the urge.

“What really matters in a good crab cake is using good crab meat,” he says. “I hope you eat lots and lots of crab, and I hope it comes from Florida because we’ve got some of the best in the world right here.”