I love crab cakes.

When my wife and I got married last year in her hometown outside Philadelphia, I insisted we have a crab cake on the dinner menu, a tip of the hat to my family and my roots as a native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

For the most part, I let my wife plan for our wedding. She’s a very good planner. Sitting down with the caterer was no exception.

Raspberry vinaigrette dressing?

Sure. Butternut squash soup? Fine.

But when it came to the crab cake, I wanted to ask a few questions.

What kind of crab would he use? 

One hundred percent lump, I was told.

No peppers or celery or anything like that, right?

The caterer shook his head.

And no funny breading?

Of course not, he said.

OK. This guy gets it, I thought.

And kind of light on the mayonnaise, right?

No, he said, we don’t use mayonnaise. We’re going to use a scallop mousse.

What? Was he serious? I turned and looked at my wife, obviously agitated. It seemed like the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.

Scallop mousse? I’m not even sure I knew what it was. Scallops in a blender and mixed in with the crab? This seemed to come out of left field.

“No mayonnaise?” I said to my wife.

She looked from me to the caterer.

I turned to him and said, again: “No mayonnaise?”

“Honey” she said, putting her hand on my knee.

For the next few days, my wife and I talked about the virtues of mayonnaise versus scallop mousse in a crab cake. In the end, I opted not to insist that my wedding-night crab cake be made to my exact specifications. Scallop mousse it was. Marriage is a funny thing. But I’m not interested in talking about marriage right now. I’m talking about crab cakes.

I grew up Eastern Shore, but I’ve lived in exile for nearly twenty years, and I’m always dismayed at how hard it is to find a proper crab cake. The boorish outlanders beyond the Chesapeake Bay watershed are constantly botching a very basic recipe.

First of all, crab cakes are made with crab. But that’s a tough concept for some. I know a health-food place down in Houston that serves a “meatless crab cake,” substituting shredded zucchini for the crab. I once saw a recipe for a “mock Maryland crab cake”—calling for a base of tofu and some shards of green seaweed (the latter supposedly “lends that little bit of ocean taste and that is what gives it the authenticity”).

That’s great, if you like that kind of food. But it’s not a crab cake.

What kind of crab? Years ago, nobody on the East Coast would ever have thought of anything except blue crab. But globalization has washed over us and eroded our traditions. King crab from Alaska. Stone crab from the Texas Gulf coast. Dungeness crab from California. Am I the only one who noticed that all those Phillips’ crab items in the grocery store are packed with crab from Thailand? 

The breading is another pitfall. To me, it should be bread. And it goes on the outside. Yet so many crab cakes are swirled throughout with bread crumbs or crushed crackers or mashed potatoes or bits of corn. A chi-chi restaurant in New York stirs in some couscous. One restaurateur in Los Angeles covers his with something called kataifi, the Middle Eastern pastry that resembles shredded wheat.

On the matter of stuffing, there is room for legitimate debate. According to Wikipedia, crab cakes with stuffing are called “Boardwalk crab cakes” as opposed to “restaurant crab cakes,” which is more crab intensive. Maybe the breaded variant has its place. But I think it’s a slippery slope.

Then there are the unnatural additives. Peppers are a common problem—green peppers, hot peppers, sweet peppers. Others add scallions or parsley. The new-fangled ones sometimes have traces of dill or cilantro or shards of shiitake mushrooms. I’ve seen people add olives or avocado and even bits of basil and cherry tomato. I love garlic, but it has no place in a crab cake.

Then there are the total and complete overhauls. I remember a Caribbean-style restaurant in Key West that served a crab cake mixed with dark rum and jerk seasoning, and was breaded with toasted coconut shavings.

And there are even some egregious examples closer to home. At the Crack Pot Seafood Restaurant in Towson, they offer “Italian” crab cakes with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese and a “Hawaiian” version with ham and pineapple.

I’m open-minded about many things. But not crab cakes. My fundamentalist crab-cake sensibilities were largely shaped by my grandmother. She was a wise and warm-hearted woman who grew up in the 1930s, when the term “crab cake” came into popular use. She chain-smoked Merits and cooked with hand-scooped dollops of Crisco measured with the width of her fingers. And she made the best crab cakes on the planet.

In a small rancher near a mill dam on Wicomico Creek south of Salisbury, she would pull steamed crabs from a bushel basket and pick them clean—never so much as a single shard of shell. She’d let the freshly formed cakes chill in the refrigerator before cooking them, then drop them in cast-iron pans that crackled and spewed bits of hot oil that’d burn your skin if you stood too close. Barely held together, with just a little bit of mayonnaise, they were seasoned generously with salt and pepper and Worcestershire sauce, stained yellow with just a bit of mustard.

She never served them with any mango-citrus aioli. She never encrusted them with almonds, topped them with capers, or dusted them with crushed wasabi peas. And I know she never used any scallop mousse.

Andrew Tilghman writes from D.C.