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Mexican Rarebit
1/2 tablespoon butter 1 small onion 1 pint can tomatoes 1 egg Salt and red pepper Cut the onion in small pieces and fry in the butter until brown. Then add the tomatoes and seasoning and cook until the tomatoes are tender. Just before serving add the egg, well beaten.
Serve on toasted crackers.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when "rarebit" had loosened from its Welsh cheese-on-toast origins to mean almost any hot savory poured over something crisp. Note that there is no cheese here at all.
- The hinge: the eggThe beaten egg goes in off the direct flame, or with the pan pulled to the side, and is stirred constantly. Dropped into a bubbling pan it scrambles into threads instead of thickening the tomato into a sauce.
- A pint can of tomatoesTwo cups, a little more than a modern 14-15 oz can. Canned tomatoes of the period were often packed whole and fairly liquid; break them up and let them reduce.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not crushed chile flakes. A pinch or two is the period intent — enough to give heat behind the tomato.
- Chafing dish equivalentsIf made in a chafing dish, as the "rarebit" format and cracker service suggest, the heat is a shallow pan over a spirit lamp: gentle, indirect, slow. A heavy skillet or saucepan on low heat does the same job, and low heat is what lets the egg thicken rather than scramble.
- Cook the tomatoes down"Until the tomatoes are tender" means until the pieces collapse and the liquid thickens, which will take a good ten minutes or more. Adding egg to a thin, watery pan gives soup, not rarebit.
- Toasted crackersCommon crackers or soda crackers, split and toasted dry until browned. Any plain unsalted cracker or a slice of toast works; salted crackers will push the seasoning too far.
- YieldNo yield is given. The quantities would stretch to about two as a light supper, or four as a small savory course.
By 1900 the chafing dish had become a fixture of informal American entertaining -- supper after the theater, cooked at the table by the host rather than the kitchen staff -- and many general cookbooks of the period carry a section devoted to it. "Rarebit" (or "rabbit") properly means the Welsh dish of melted cheese on toast, but the word drifted to cover any quickly made hot mixture served over toast or crackers, so the name here signals the format rather than the ingredients. The "Mexican" label appears to be doing much the same loose work: in American cookbooks of this era it often meant little more than tomato with cayenne, applied to dishes with no particular connection to Mexican cooking. Canned tomatoes made the dish possible year-round, and their ready availability by the turn of the century is what let a hostess produce a hot supper without a long spell at the stove.