Welsh Rabbit
To one tablespoonful of Pompeian Olive Oil, add half a pound of cheese cut into bits, and stir until the cheese is melted. Add a pinch each of salt, paprika and soda, and one egg or the yolks of two beaten with half a cupful of stewed and strained tomato. Stir until smooth and creamy and serve immediately on toast.
Since biblical times genuine olive oil has stood the test as a wholesome and delicious food.
A tomato-and-oil version of Welsh rabbit, from a booklet published to sell Pompeian olive oil. It comes together in a few minutes and is unforgiving of heat.
- Low heat, alwaysThis is the hinge. Melt the cheese over the gentlest possible heat or in a double boiler; heated much beyond the point at which it has just melted, the cheese proteins tighten and the fat separates into a greasy, stringy mass. Keep it moving and pull it off the heat while it still looks slightly loose.
- Add the egg off the boilBeat the egg with the tomato first, then stir that into the softened cheese with the pan off the direct heat. Poured into a hot pan it scrambles, and no amount of stirring will smooth it out again.
- The sodaThe pinch of soda is there to neutralise the acid in the tomato, which would otherwise curdle the cheese. It is doing real work here, not leavening. A pinch means a pinch; more will taste soapy.
- CheeseHalf a pound is about 225g. The recipe simply says "cheese"; a firm, sharp American or Cheddar-type is the likely intention, and a well-aged Cheddar grated rather than "cut into bits" melts faster and more evenly. Avoid pre-shredded cheese, which is dusted with anti-caking starch.
- Stewed and strained tomatoHalf a cup of plain cooked tomato pulp, seeds and skin removed and no seasoning. Passata or a smooth canned tomato puree, thinned if very thick, is the closest thing on a modern shelf; do not substitute tomato paste.
- YieldEnough for four slices of toast as a light supper, or two as a substantial one. Serve it the moment it is smooth, since it stiffens and separates on standing and does not reheat well.
Welsh rabbit — the older and more defensible spelling, "rarebit" being a later genteel correction — is melted seasoned cheese poured over toast, and the name is generally traced to an English joke at Welsh expense, the cheese standing in for meat a poor household could not afford. By the late nineteenth century it had become a staple of American chafing-dish cookery, the sort of thing a hostess assembled at the table, and dozens of variants circulated with beer, milk, mustard or tomato. This one belongs to a genre of its own: the branded promotional pamphlet, in which a manufacturer commissioned recipes that all happened to require its product. Olive oil in place of the traditional butter is the whole point of the exercise, and the closing sentence about biblical times is advertising copy rather than cookery, aimed at American readers who were often said still to regard olive oil as a foreign medicine, something closer to a druggist's item than a kitchen staple.