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Mt. Clemens Rarebit
6 ounces American cheese 2 ounces butter 2 chopped green peppers 1/2 can red kidney beans Squares of buttered toast Melt the cheese; add the butter, then the pepper, and last, the beans. When thoroughly hot serve on buttered toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when a spirit lamp on the sideboard was standard entertaining equipment. Most of what needs translating is the cheese and the vessel.
- Use the water panA chafing dish has a hot-water jacket beneath the blazer pan, and a cheese dish of this kind was very likely made in one, though the recipe does not say so. Cheese held much above about 150F will tighten and weep its fat, so work in a double boiler or a heavy pan over the lowest possible flame and stir until it is just fluid.
- "American cheese" in 1900"American cheese" here -- This means ordinary domestic factory cheddar, not the wrapped processed slices of today. Six ounces of a mild young cheddar, grated rather than cubed, melts closest to what was intended. A processed cheese will in fact melt more smoothly, if less interestingly.
- Half a can of kidney beansCanned sizes varied and the book does not say which tin it means; half a tin comes out at roughly a scant cup of drained beans. Drain and rinse them; the canning liquid will thin the cheese and dull the color.
- The peppers want cooking firstTwo chopped green bell peppers added raw will release water into the cheese and stay crunchy. Sweat them in the butter for a few minutes until soft, then combine, which also gets around the fact that the original adds butter and pepper in an order that does nothing in particular.
- "Thoroughly hot" is the limitOnce the beans are heated through, serve. Held over the flame the mixture separates into oil and a rubbery curd, and no amount of stirring brings it back.
- Toast at the last minuteButtered toast under a wet cheese mixture goes soft within a minute or two. Toast it while the cheese melts and plate immediately.
- YieldEnough for four as a light supper or luncheon dish, two if it is the only thing on the table.
- The stray last line"4 hard-boiled eggs, 1 cup cream sauce" does not belong to this recipe; it appears to be the beginning of an adjacent one. Ignore it here.
Welsh rabbit, which by the later eighteenth century was also being written "rarebit," was a staple of chafing-dish cookery, and by the 1900s American cookbooks were printing many regional and hotel variations on it: tomato rarebit, oyster rarebit, golden buck. Mt. Clemens, Michigan, was then a well-known mineral-bath resort near Detroit, drawing visitors to its hotels and sanitariums; how the dish came by the name is not recorded. The kidney beans suggest an American reworking rather than a British one; canned beans were cheap and reliable by this date, and they turn a cheese savory into something substantial enough to serve as the whole meal.