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Welsh Rarebit
Melt one teaspoon butter; add one teaspoon each of salt, mustard and paprika; add two cups American cheese When melted, add one half cup cream or ale. Stir vigorously until smooth, and pour over hot buttered crackers or toast.
A chafing-dish rarebit is fast, but it turns on temperature control: cheese held too hot breaks into oil and rubber. A few notes on the ingredients and the pan.
- Low, gentle heat is the whole recipeMelt the cheese slowly and take it off the heat the moment it is smooth. Above a bare simmer the proteins tighten and squeeze out fat, and the sauce turns stringy and greasy — a fault no amount of stirring will fix.
- "American cheese" here is not the wrapped sliceIn a book of this period this means domestic factory cheddar, a firm aged yellow cheese. Use a good sharp cheddar, grated rather than cubed so it melts evenly. Two cups grated is roughly 8 oz.
- The saltOne teaspoon of salt against 8 oz of cheddar is a great deal, since the cheese is already salty. A quarter teaspoon or less, tasted at the end, suits modern cheddar.
- Mustard and paprikaDry mustard powder is meant, not prepared mustard; a teaspoon is assertive but traditional, and it also helps keep the emulsion together. The paprika sold to American cooks at this date would usually have been mild and sweet rather than hot or smoked.
- Cream or aleAle gives the sharper, more traditional flavour; cream gives a rounder sauce that is more forgiving of heat. Add it warm rather than cold so the cheese does not seize.
- The chafing dishIf this comes from a chafing-dish chapter, the original likely assumes a blazer set over a hot-water pan, which caps the temperature. Without one, use a heavy saucepan on the lowest burner setting, or a bowl over barely simmering water.
- Serving and yieldNo yield is given; roughly four as a savoury or two as a supper dish. Have the toast or crackers already hot and buttered — rarebit stiffens within a minute or two of leaving the pan and does not reheat well.
Welsh rarebit is a genteel respelling of Welsh rabbit, a name recorded in English from the early eighteenth century and generally understood as a joke at the expense of the Welsh: the cheese is the rabbit of a household that has no game. Printed recipes appear well before 1800, and by the Victorian period the dish had settled into its familiar form of melted cheese loosened with ale, sharpened with mustard, poured over toast. Its place here, among the chafing-dish chapters, reflects a specific American fashion: from the 1890s into the 1910s the chafing dish was the fashionable equipment of late suppers, club rooms and college students, valued because it cooked at the table without a kitchen. Rarebit, lobster Newburg and creamed oysters were the standard repertoire. Lowney's was a chocolate company, and its cookbook — like other manufacturer-issued books of the period — ranged well beyond its own product to serve as a general household manual.