Our city may not be as famous as Baltimore for its crab cakes, but Philly is part of the Eastern seaboard crab cake belt, and makes its own unique style, says Seattle chef Tom Douglas, a Delaware native and author of the newly published I Love Crab Cakes! (William Morrow) cookbook.

SHELL, NO: Skip Snock's Philly-style crab cake is based on his grandmother Rose's 94-year-old recipe. : Michael T. Regan

"Philly and Jersey Shore crab cakes have breading inside and out and are deep fried as opposed to Baltimore/D.C. style, which is usually just egg-laced crabmeat, broiled or baked," says Douglas. "Down there, bread is a sin."

Douglas believes the first crab cakes were made in the Virginia colony in the 1650s. "The English and Dutch ate lots of custards and puddings and so crab cakes were a traditional treatment for crabmeat."

Philadelphians have been eating crab cakes since the late 1800s or early 1900s at oyster houses like the 94-year-old Snockey's, where the dish was originally called deviled crab because of its cayenne pepper spicing. (Family member Skip Snock says the cayenne kick has been toned down in recent years because of customer complaints.)

Snockey's crab cake recipe, which was invented by Snock's grandmother Rose, also includes blue crab, cracker meal and egg. Rose started making the crab cakes two days after the restaurant opened in 1912 (Snock's brother Ken says Rose had a baby the day it opened and took the break to recuperate), until the year before she died in 1992. "Toward the end, her hands were so arthritic that one of us would have to go in there and shape the mixture into cakes for her," recalls Skip from his station behind the cherry bar in the restaurant's fourth home, a 200-year-old former pharmacy located near Second and Washington streets.

Philadelphia-style crab cakes are also on the menus at Anastasi and Ippolito's fish markets in South Philly, a spinoff from the fresh crabs sold at both places. "This is more of a bar food, like ribs," says Ippolito's Sam D' Angelo, picking through a bushel basket of live blue crabs. "Crab cakes are more like a sitdown dinner."

Ippolito's offers two styles of breaded crab cakes, fried up for takeout: a $4.99 cake containing vegetable roux and bread crumbs "with a lot of flavor," and a $6.99 almost pure jumbo lump crabmeat Philly/Baltimore hybrid that's becoming increasingly popular.

Snockey's also offers a Baltimore-style crab cake made with lump crabmeat in addition to grandmother Rose's original fried creation. "Forty years ago almost all of our seafood was deep fried. Now most of it is broiled," says Skip, who attributes this to increasing health-consciousness. But author Douglas says the increasing availability of crabmeat nationwide, beginning in the 1980s, has made the dish a standard offering at upscale restaurants in places where there had been no crab cake tradition.

So anything went, and still goes. The tempura crab cakes with shredded nori, and crab cheesecake recipes in Douglas' book are proof. One local result is the Philly/Baltimore hybrid that is the sole crab cake offering at South Philly takeout joints Dad's Stuffing and Leone's Crab Cakes, both of which only began making their own crab cakes in the past seven years. DiNardo's, like Snockey's, sells its cakes both broiled and fried.

Although he offers customers the option of a Baltimore-style crab cake, philosophically Skip Snock is not a fan. In fact, at one point in a conversation, he questions whether a pile of broiled pure lump crabmeat can accurately be called a crab cake.

Douglas is more open-minded. Nevertheless, the crab cake he serves at his Seattle restaurants, and that snagged him his crab cake book contract, contains bread crumbs and is breaded and pan fried. And after testing all 50 recipes in his book and flying in mail-order samples of crab cakes from restaurants around the country, he says, "I still love the crunchiness of a buttered bread crumb on the outside of a crab cake."

The way it is — or at least always used to be — in Philly.

(cwyman@citypaper.net)