the.com/crab cake

means A pan-fried or baked patty made mostly of crab meat bound with egg, breadcrumbs, and seasoning — the ratio of crab to filler being a constant subject of moral debate.

from Straightforward kitchen-English compounding — 'crab' the crustacean plus 'cake' in its old sense of a flattened, pan-cooked lump of food (think fishcake, griddle cake, Johnnycake). Crab dishes bound with breadcrumbs and fried or baked go back a long way in American coastal cooking, especially around the Chesapeake Bay, where blue crabs were cheap and plentiful and cooks needed a way to stretch the meat without losing the point of it. The name itself isn't clever — it's just honest shorthand for 'cake made of crab' — which makes it funnier that the modern dish so often inverts the ratio the name implies.