Cut ½ pound of cheese in very small pieces and add 1 ounce of fresh butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of fine bread-crumbs, 1 teaspoonful of prepared mustard, salt and pepper and a pinch of cayenne to taste. Mix well together to a smooth paste. Have ready some buttered toast; place on a dish, spread with the mixture and set in the oven until melted. Serve at once.
A cheese-on-toast in the rarebit family, thickened with crumbs rather than a beer-and-flour sauce. It comes together in minutes and lives or dies on how hot you let the cheese get.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe hinge: don't overheat the cheese -- Cheese held too long or too hot breaks, and the fat pools out over the toast. The recipe gives no temperature, only "set in the oven until melted"; a hot oven or broiler for a few minutes, until the surface glistens and just begins to bubble, then serve at once.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound of cheese is 8 oz, about 2 cups grated; 1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. That fills four generous slices of toast, or serves two as a supper dish.
- Which cheeseThe recipe does not say; a firm aged Cheddar or a Dunlop-style Scottish cheese would suit it. Avoid pre-shredded bagged cheese, which is dusted with anti-caking starch and melts grainy.
- Cut small, or grate"Very small pieces" is what the recipe asks for, so the cheese will work into a paste. Grating on the coarse side of a box grater achieves the same thing faster and melts more evenly.
- Mixing to a pasteCold cheese and cold butter will not blend smoothly. Let both sit at room temperature for twenty minutes, or work the mixture briefly in a food processor; a paste spreads and melts far better than loose crumbs of cheese.
- Prepared mustardThis means a wet jarred mustard, not mustard powder. An English-style prepared mustard is a reasonable choice here; a teaspoon in this quantity of cheese is assertive but not aggressive.
- The breadcrumbsThe recipe calls for fine crumbs without saying dry or fresh. They do more than decorate: they take up released fat and help the topping hold together on the toast.
- The toastToast the bread well and butter it while hot, then top and heat. Under-toasted bread goes soggy the moment the cheese melts into it.
Rarebit began as Welsh rabbit, generally traced to an English joke name for melted cheese on toast served where a rabbit might have been; "rarebit" is often said to be a later genteel respelling of the same word. By the Victorian and Edwardian period cookbooks had multiplied it into national variants, though the period sources are not consistent about what distinguished one from another. This book is a day-by-day calendar assigning one nation's dish to each date, so the Scottish version arrives on June 9 between an Italian coffee cream and an Irish ham omelet.