Welsh Rarebit
2 cups grated cheese Yolks of 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk Salt and red pepper 4 slices buttered toast Place the milk in a pan over a moderate fire; when hot, add the cheese; stir until the cheese is thoroughly melted; then add the eggs and seasoning and pour over the toasted bread.
A short, egg-thickened rarebit with no beer in it, which puts it closer to a cheese custard than to the pub version. The whole dish depends on keeping the pan below a simmer once the yolks go in.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks are in, the mixture is a custard and will scramble into grains at anything above a bare simmer. Pull the pan off the heat, stir the yolks in, and return it to very low heat only long enough to thicken, about a minute.
- "Moderate fire"Roughly medium on a modern burner, though for this mixture it is safer to err toward medium-low. A heavy saucepan, or a bowl set over barely simmering water, gives you far more control than direct heat.
- Red pepperThis is cayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper flakes. A scant 1/8 teaspoon is enough for 2 cups of cheese; it should register as warmth behind the cheese rather than heat of its own.
- The cheese2 cups grated is roughly 7 to 8 ounces. Use a firm aged cheddar or Cheshire, grated on the coarse side; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that turns the sauce grainy, and young mild cheese gives almost no flavor once diluted with milk.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks with a spoonful of the hot cheese mixture before adding them to the pan. Dropped in cold and whole, they set on contact with the hot cheese.
- Toast timingMake the toast last and keep it hot. Rarebit sets and skins over within a couple of minutes off the heat, so the sauce should wait on the bread rather than the other way round.
- YieldFour slices, so two modest servings as a supper dish or four as a first course. It does not reheat; the emulsion breaks.
The name has been argued over for three centuries: "Welsh rabbit" appears in English print by the 1720s, apparently as a joke at the expense of people said to be too poor for meat, with "rarebit" arising later as a genteel correction of what was never a rabbit at all. Cheese-on-toast in some form is much older than either spelling. What is interesting about this version is that the yolks, not the cheese alone, do the binding. The ale or beer of the tavern rarebit has dropped out entirely in favor of milk.