Go for the gold: Fry Up Some Crab Cakes

May 11, 2022

Chris Simpson for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Frances Boswell.

Fry Up Some Crab Cakes

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. It's a great newspaper section we printed last night, rolled into blue bags and delivered to the vicinity of our subscribers' front doors this morning.

I loved Kim Severson's profile of the Gullah Geechee cook Emily Meggett, a woman who's never used a cookbook in her life and just published her first, "Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island." I'm definitely making her crab cakes (above) soon. Maybe her benne cookies, too.

I was thrilled to read our Becky Hughes on what's maybe shaping up to be the drink of the summer: the Dirty Shirley, a vodka-spiked accounting of that kids' menu standby, the Shirley Temple. The drink, Becky writes, "echoes the Juicy Couture, hot pink, low-rise post-Y2K aesthetic." When you're ordering one, a TikTok influencer named Tiff Baira told her, "you feel like Paris Hilton might get that." You in? (Me: Hard pass.)

David Tanis gave us a very grown-up menu for the season: beet soup with tarragon, chives and yogurt to start, roasted wild salmon with ginger-lime butter to follow, and a cherry compote with almonds for dessert. That'd be a terrific meal to plan for the weekend. Get on it!

And Melissa Clark pulled up with a stunner of a springtime meal: polenta with asparagus, peas and mint. "It looks fancy but is extremely easy to make," she wrote, polenta topped with "a quick braise that layers asparagus and peas with shallots, vermouth and loads of fresh mint." That's my dinner tonight, for sure.

Unless … Maybe this chicken with apricot, tamarind and chipotle sauce? This fried snapper with Creole sauce? Tempeh tacos?

You'll find even more ideas on our TikTok, Instagram and YouTube accounts, and thousands of recipes on New York Times Cooking. Settled law: You need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions are the fuel in our stoves. They allow us to keep doing this work that we love. I hope, if you haven't taken one out already, that you will consider subscribing today. Thank you.

Write us if you run into trouble with our software, or with your subscription: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. And you can always write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I can't respond to everyone. But I read every letter sent.

Now, it's a long day's gallop from anything to do with yeasted doughnuts or garlicky snails, but Molly Young is correct: Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song" does have gravitational pull. I read about it in her newsletter and immediately went and pulled it down from my shelf. I'm glad I did.

Eleven Tony nominations for "A Strange Loop" on Broadway! Here's Maya Phillips' stellar review of the musical in The Times. If you're in New York or coming soon, it's time to book tickets.

Joan Latchford was a nun who left her calling to photograph people in Toronto during the 1960s and 1970s. Toronto Life assembled a retrospective, and Haley Steinberg wrote the introduction. Spend some time with that.

Finally, Eric Burdon was born on this day in 1941. He is 81. Here he is with the Animals, singing "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1965. Wild! I'll be back on Friday.