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Welsh Rarebit
Brillat Savarin, the famous French gourmet, gives the following recipe taken from the papers of M. Trollet, bailiff in Meudon, in the Canton of Berne: "Take as many eggs as you wish, according to the number of guests, and weigh them; then take a piece of cheese weighing a third of the weight of the eggs, and a slice of butter weighing a sixth; beat the eggs well up in a saucepan, after which put in the butter and cheese, the latter either grated or chopped up very small; place the saucepan on a good fire, and stir it with a flat spoon until the mixture becomes sufficiently thick and soft; add a little salt and a large portion of pepper, and serve it up in a hot dish. Bring out the best wine, and let it go round freely, and wonders will be done."
A cheese-and-egg dish built entirely on proportions rather than fixed amounts, which makes it easy to scale and easy to ruin. Everything depends on gentle heat.
- Working out the weightsWeigh the eggs (the recipe does not say whether in the shell, though whole is the likelier reading), then take cheese at one-third that weight and butter at one-sixth. Six large eggs run to roughly 11-12 oz, giving about 4 oz cheese and 2 oz butter, enough for three or four.
- The cheese to useThe recipe names no cheese; given the Bernese attribution a firm Swiss mountain cheese such as Emmental or Gruyere, grated, is a sensible choice. Anything very young or very wet will weep fat and water instead of binding with the eggs.
- "A good fire" is not high heat"A good fire" -- In period usage this means a brisk fire, but eggs and cheese together set well under a simmer, so medium-low heat or a double boiler is safer: a hard flame will scramble the eggs and squeeze the cheese into strings.
- The hinge: stop while it is still loose"Sufficiently thick and soft" means the consistency of soft scrambled eggs that still flows. It firms further in the hot dish, so pull it from the heat a moment before it looks done.
- Flat spoonA wooden spatula or flat-edged wooden spoon, kept moving across the base of the pan; a flat edge scrapes the setting layer off the bottom rather than stirring around it.
- "A large portion of pepper"Freshly ground black pepper, and genuinely a lot of it, closer to a teaspoon than a pinch for the quantity above. The salt should be added cautiously, since aged Alpine cheese carries its own.
- No toast, despite the titleUnlike an English or American rarebit, nothing here is poured over bread or browned under a grill. The recipe says only to serve it up in a hot dish, and it should be eaten at once.
This passage comes from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du gout (1825), where it appears not as a rarebit but as fondue, credited to the papers of a Swiss bailiff (the place name here, Meudon, is given elsewhere as Moudon). It is a reminder that "fondue" once meant simply a melted-cheese preparation, in this case bound with egg and butter and cooked in a saucepan; the now-familiar pot of cheese loosened with white wine and dipped into with long forks is a later Swiss development, promoted heavily in the twentieth century. How a Bernese egg-and-cheese pan dish came to sit under a Welsh name in a chapter of cheese dishes the text does not explain. The closing instruction about bringing out the best wine forms part of the quoted recipe itself.