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Welsh Rarebit (One-quarter of a pound of rich)
One-quarter of a pound of rich cream cheese, one fourth cup of cream or milk, one teaspoonful of mustard, half a teaspoonful of salt, a few grains of cayenne, one egg, one teaspoonful of butter, four slices of toast. Break the cheese in small pieces or if hard grate it. Put it with the milk in a double boiler. Toast the bread and keep it hot. Mix the mustard, salt and pepper; add the egg and beat well. When the cheese is melted, stir in the egg and butter and cook two minutes, or until it thickens a little, but do not let it curdle. Pour it over the toast. Many use ale instead of cream. This is a delicious dish.
A small, quick supper dish that lives or dies by heat control. Everything below is in service of not curdling the egg.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe double boiler is not optional. Keep the water at a bare simmer and never let it touch the bottom of the upper pan; once the egg goes in, the mixture needs only about two minutes of stirring to thicken. Direct heat or a rolling boil will scramble the egg and squeeze the cheese into rubbery strings in a pool of oil.
- "Rich cream cheese"This need not mean the modern block of Philadelphia-style spread; the term was used loosely at the time, and the instruction to grate it "if hard" shows a firm cheese was at least anticipated here. A sharp cheddar is the usual choice today; a young, mild cheese will taste of very little under the mustard and cayenne.
- MustardA teaspoonful of mustard in a book of this date most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar. If you substitute prepared mustard, use rather more and expect a vinegar note.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound is 4 oz of cheese, and a quarter cup of cream is 2 fl oz. The cream is there to keep the cheese fluid; skim milk gives a thinner, more fragile sauce.
- The stray pepperThe list calls for cayenne but the method says "mustard, salt and pepper." They mean the same few grains of cayenne. A pinch is enough to sharpen the cheese without reading as heat.
- The ale variantSwapping ale for the cream is traditional and changes the dish considerably: it is thinner, tangier and more prone to breaking, since there is no dairy fat to help it stay emulsified. Use a mild ale rather than anything strongly hopped, which turns bitter when reduced.
- ToastKeep the toast genuinely hot and fairly thick, and pour the moment the sauce thickens. A cool or thin slice goes soggy under the sauce within a minute.
- YieldFour slices of toast, so four small servings or two as a light supper with a salad. The mixture does not hold or reheat; it is made and eaten.
Welsh rarebit is melted cheese on toast dressed up with a name, and the name has been argued over for centuries: the earlier form was "Welsh rabbit," recorded in English from the eighteenth century as a joke at the expense of the Welsh, the implication being that cheese was the only rabbit a poor man was likely to get. "Rarebit" is a later genteel respelling, generally understood as an attempt to tidy away the insult, and by 1900 American cookbooks used the two spellings more or less interchangeably. Its appearance here is telling: in the American chafing-dish craze of the 1890s and 1900s, rarebit was a favourite, cooked at the table after the theatre or at a late supper, which is exactly the kind of small, quick, slightly showy dish this section collects. The addition of an egg, as here, is the cautious version, and it gives the cook a little more margin than cheese and ale alone.