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Welsh Rarebit
Melt 2 tbsp. butter, add 1 tbsp. flour, 1/2 tsp. mustard, 1/4 tsp. salt. Mix together and add 1 cup of milk. When hot, add 1 cup of cheese cut thin. Stir until melted, and just before serving, add one beaten egg. Put small soda crackers on plates, cover with rarebit and serve immediately. Have plates and crackers warm. This amount will serve four people.
— Mrs. M. Howard Ferguson
This is the tamed, church-supper version of Welsh rarebit: a flour-thickened béchamel rather than the beer-and-cheese emulsion of the pub original, which makes it far more forgiving. The points below cover the few places it can still go wrong.
- Keep the heat low once the cheese goes inCheese held above a bare simmer will tighten and weep its fat, leaving a grainy sauce under an oily slick. Pull the pan to low heat before adding the cheese and stir only until it melts.
- The eggTemper it — stir a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the beaten egg, then return the mixture to the pan off the direct heat. Added cold and straight in, it scrambles in threads. It should thicken the sauce, not set in it.
- What cheeseA cup of cheese "cut thin" is roughly 4 oz, grated or in thin shavings; shredded melts more evenly than the slices the original implies. The recipe does not say which cheese; a sharp cheddar suits the dish. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that can make the sauce chalky.
- MustardThe half teaspoon is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard. If substituting the jarred kind, roughly double it and expect a little added acidity.
- Small soda crackersPlain unsalted or lightly salted saltines, or their equivalent. Warming the plates and crackers is not a flourish — this sauce sets fast, and a cold plate turns it to paste before it reaches the table.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a thin sauce by design; the cheese and egg do most of the thickening. If it seems loose before the cheese goes in, that is correct.
- YieldFour servings as written, which is a light supper or luncheon dish rather than a main course. It does not hold or reheat well — the egg and cheese separate on standing.
Welsh rarebit is melted cheese on toast dressed up with a name, and the name is the interesting part: the earliest printed forms in the eighteenth century read "Welsh rabbit," generally understood as an English joke at Welsh expense — the rabbit a poor man's household could actually afford being a lump of cheese. "Rarebit" appears later as a genteel correction of a word that was never a mistake, and both spellings circulated for a long time afterwards. The chafing-dish craze of the 1890s and 1900s made rarebit a fixture of American light suppers and late-night entertaining, and versions like this one — thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, bound with an egg, milk in place of ale, and served over soda crackers rather than toast — show the dish thoroughly domesticated.