Home › Luncheon Dishes › Welsh Rarebit
Welsh Rarebit
1 T butter 1 t cornstarch 1/2 C milk 1/2 C Kraft cheese ½ t each salt, mustard and paprika Few grains cayenne pepper Melt butter, add cornstarch and milk gradually. Cook about two minutes or until thick and smooth. Add cheese and continue cooking until it is melted. Season and serve on crackers or toasted slices of bread.
Mrs. R. F. Wright.
A small, thickened rarebit built on a cornstarch white sauce rather than beer — quick, forgiving, and unlikely to break. Two points of the original text need reading correctly before you start.
- The "12 t" is a typoIt should read 1/2 teaspoon each of salt, mustard and paprika, and the salt in particular should be cut back if the cheese is a processed loaf, which is already salty. Twelve teaspoons of salt in half a cup of sauce would be inedible.
- T and tT is a tablespoon, t a teaspoon. So: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 teaspoon cornstarch, 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup cheese.
- Kraft cheeseIn a church cookbook of this vintage this means Kraft's processed loaf cheese, sold in tins and later in foil bricks. It melts to a perfectly smooth sauce because the emulsifying salts prevent the fat from separating. A modern equivalent is American cheese or Velveeta; if you substitute a real cheddar, grate it, add it off the heat in handfuls, and expect a slightly grainier result.
- Cheese by volumeHalf a cup of grated cheese is about 2 ounces, roughly 55 g. If you are cutting it from a loaf, dice it small so it melts before the sauce overcooks.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard. It is doing real work here — mustard sharpens the flavour of mild processed cheese and helps the sauce stay emulsified.
- Keep it below a simmerOnce the cheese goes in, hold the pan at a bare steam. Boiling a cheese sauce squeezes the protein tight and pushes the fat out, leaving a greasy, stringy mass no amount of stirring will bring back.
- YieldThis makes about three-quarters of a cup of sauce — enough for two people on toast, or four as a cracker spread. It doubles cleanly.
- Serve it immediatelyA cornstarch-bound rarebit sets firm as it cools and skins over. Have the toast made and the plates warm before the cheese goes into the pan.
Welsh rarebit — a slab of toast under melted seasoned cheese — is usually read as an English joke at Welsh expense before it is a recipe, the name generally traced to the eighteenth century, when "Welsh rabbit" was taken to mean the cheese a man had instead of game. The "rarebit" spelling is generally understood as a later genteel correction of a pun that was never a mistake. Traditional versions use ale or beer and a strong farmhouse cheddar, melted directly with butter and mustard. What Mrs. Wright's version shows is how thoroughly American home cooking had absorbed two twentieth-century conveniences: the starch-thickened white sauce, widely taught in domestic-science classes as a dependable base, and branded processed cheese, which J. L. Kraft began producing in Chicago in the 1910s and which reached Midwestern kitchens as a reliable, shelf-stable product that would not curdle. The beer is gone too, which in a church cookbook may well not be an accident.