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Cheese and Tomato Rarebit
Melt one tablespoon butter; add three sliced tomatoes, one half cup milk, one teaspoon salt, two cups cheese. Stir continually until cheese is melted. Add three eggs well beaten. When hot, serve on hot buttered toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish that is really a loose cheese custard rather than a true rarebit. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: this mixture has no starch and no beer to protect it, so it will curdle the moment it approaches a simmer.
- Keep it below a simmerCheese plus milk plus egg with nothing to stabilise them will break into grainy curds and weeping fat if the pan gets much past 170-180F. On a modern stove use the lowest burner setting or a double boiler.
- Two cups of cheeseMeasured grated, that is roughly 6-8 oz. The recipe does not specify a variety; a sharp aged cheddar is more likely to separate, so a young cheddar or a mix with a little Monterey Jack behaves better.
- The tomatoes are the wet variableThree sliced tomatoes can throw off a lot of liquid against only half a cup of milk. Peel and seed them, or cook the slices down in the butter for a few minutes first, or the finished dish will be soupy.
- Temper the eggsAdding three beaten eggs straight into hot cheese is how the dish scrambles. Stir a ladle of the hot mixture into the eggs first, then return the lot to the pan, stirring constantly.
- "When hot" means cookedThe eggs should reach about 160F, at which point the mixture visibly thickens and coats the spoon. That is also close to the temperature at which it will break, so it wants attention for the last minute rather than an unwatched pan.
- SaltA teaspoon is on the generous side against 8 oz of cheese, which is already salty. Start with half and correct at the end.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest about four light servings over four to six slices of toast. Have the toast buttered and waiting; the rarebit does not hold and will stiffen and separate if kept warm.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer. The chafing dish became a middle-class fixture in America in the 1890s and 1900s: a spirit-lamp pan that let a hostess cook at the table after the theatre or at a late supper, without troubling the kitchen. Rarebit, or Welsh rabbit, was its signature dish, and cookbooks of the era proliferated variations - with ale, with beer, with tomato, with oysters. The tomato version, sometimes said to have been known as a "blushing bunny," softens the sharpness of the cheese and stretches it, and the beaten eggs here do the thickening that flour does elsewhere. That every version required constant stirring over a low flame was the point: the cooking was the entertainment.