CRAB CAKES WITH MUSTARD BEURRE BLANC

This recipe was inspired by the crab cakes with Meaux Mustard Beurre Blanc in “Julia Reed’s New Orleans: Food, Fun and Fieldtrips for Letting the Good Times Roll,” (2019).  That’s a great cookbook because Reed presents classic recipes with something new… a twist, as it were.  And that’s quite an accomplishment because how do you improve on recipes that require no improvement?  Crab cakes, for example.  Everyone (in New Orleans) knows that they’re all about the quality of the crab meat and the nature of the binder (egg, breadcrumbs, even a bechamel sauce if you want a really creamy cake).  In Reed’s version of crab cakes, she uses pureed shrimp as a binder.  While I appreciate that effort and it might be great, I thought that was gilding the lily.  So, I made a more traditional crab cake and allowed myself to be inspired by her mustard Beurre blanc sauce (because I’m the Beurre blanc queen). The result was divine, and my dinner guest loved it.  I had a light almost fluffy cake with a crispy buttery crust and a tangy mustardy-butter sauce that perfectly complimented but did not overwhelm the crabmeat.  In my less than humble opinion, the plating was pretty too (see the middle picture, above). I highly recommend Julia Reed’s cookbook — the pictures are beautiful, and her writing is lively and intimate.  Sadly, Julia Reed died in 2020 at age 59.  She was someone I admired from afar, and slightly envied because it seemed she had figured out how to make a living out of being witty and smart and enjoying herself.  The following is an excerpt from her obituary by John Meacham in Garden & Gun.

Born in Greenville, Mississippi, on September 11, 1960, Julia Evans Reed was the daughter of Judy and Clarke Reed. Her mother was a native of Nashville, the child of a prominent Belle Meade family; her father, a businessman and leader of the Mississippi Republican Party who played a role in the years of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

As the novelist Jay McInerney recalled, “Julia Reed was Mississippi’s answer to Dorothy Parker, gifted with a biting wit, a fierce intellect, and a generous spirit of hospitality. She was an intellectual and a hedonist, a brilliant raconteur with a colorfully profane vocabulary who could whip up a delicious dinner for twenty of her friends and then drink them all under the table before waking up a few hours later to deliver a sparkling performance on MSNBC. She was unforgettable and irreplaceable.”

Educated in Greenville, and at Madeira, Georgetown, and American University, Julia lived and worked in Washington, D.C., New York City, New Orleans, and Greenville. A longtime editor and writer for Vogue magazine, she also contributed to the New York Times, Newsweek, Conde Nast Traveler, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, and Elle Décor. And until the time of her death, she was a cornerstone of Garden & Gun, where loyal readers and fans would turn immediately to her column for dispatches from her world.

As an author, columnist, and speaker, Reed was a figure in the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher and of Edith Wharton. She was a writer of great range whose subjects included corrupt but charming Southern politicians, first families, food, art, architecture, gardening, decorating, and the triumphs and the tragedies of the American South.

Her books included Julia Reed’s New Orleans: Food, Fun, and Field Trips for Letting the Good Times Roll (2019); South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land (2018); Julia Reed’s South: Spirited Entertaining and High-Style Fun All Year Long (2016); The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (2008); Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (2009); and The Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena (2005).

If we’d tried to invent a character like Julia, nobody would have believed it. She was a tsunami of talent, charm, and energy. She could write about anything and make it sing. Her distinctive voice was at once affectionate and arch—a tough combination to pull off.

She lived large. On any given day or season you might find Julia driving around Mississippi with Jessica Lange. Or dining at Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville with Anthony Bourdain. Or she’d be in Paris, reporting on caviar for the Wall Street Journal. Or in London, picking up a new “sleep coat” for her father. Or filing an essay for Vogue on a planned wedding that went awry some decades ago; a favorite detail was that her mother had so much champagne on hand that she was still giving the postman bottles of it three years later. Describing a New Year’s Eve party at the Georgetown house of Washington Post legend Ben Bradlee and his wife, the writer Sally Quinn, Julia recalled: “I walked in behind Alma and Colin Powell. So far, so good. Plenty of booze, and plenty of people drinking it. A delicious late supper of choucroute and mashed potatoes soaked it all up, and by midnight everybody was dancing. Lauren Bacall danced. Tom and Meredith Brokaw danced. We all danced, with the exception of Al Gore, who, at the stroke of midnight, was standing almost alone in the living room talking about the environment.”

I have always been struck by how many people come up to me to bear unsought witness to Julia’s power—the readers of her work who, on learning that I am fortunate enough to be her friend, want to tell me how important, how wonderful, how indispensable they find her voice. In her work and in friends we will always be able to hear her again—learning anew from her alternately funny and wise, charming and knowing, transporting and illuminating vision of life. Her voice lingers even now, resonating still.