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Sardine Rarebit
Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter, add half a pound of fresh cheese, grated or broken into bits, and stir constantly while it melts; then add gradually the beaten yolk of an egg, diluted with twothirds a cup of cream. Stir until smooth and slightly thickened; season with a scant half a teaspoonful of paprica, one-fourth a teaspoonful of salt and a few drops of tabasco sauce. Have ready a box of sardines, drained, broiled carefully and laid on the untoasted side of bread toasted on one side; pour the rarebit over the sardines and serve at once.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when the rarebit was the standard late-evening entertainment. The whole thing hangs on gentle heat.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolk and cream go in, the mixture must stay below a simmer or the egg will curdle and the cheese will string and weep oil. Work over the chafing dish's water pan, or over a low burner with the pan lifted off the heat as needed.
- "Fresh cheese"Not fresh cheese in the modern sense of ricotta or fromage blanc. In period American recipes it appears to have meant a young, mild, quick-melting cheese — a mild Cheddar or something similar — rather than an aged sharp one. Aged cheese has less moisture and tends to separate more readily.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound of cheese is about 2 cups grated. Two-thirds a cup of cream is a scant 160 ml; use heavy or whipping cream, as the fat is part of what keeps the sauce from breaking.
- PapricaSimply paprika, spelled as it often was then. A scant half teaspoon of a mild sweet paprika, which at the time was probably as much for colour as heat — the tabasco does the actual work.
- A box of sardinesA tin, packed in oil, roughly 3.75 oz today. Drain them well and blot; oil left clinging will slick the surface of the rarebit.
- Broiling the sardinesThey are already cooked, so this is a brief pass under a hot broiler to firm and brown them — a minute or two, watching closely. "Carefully" is the operative word, since they fall apart if turned with anything but a thin spatula.
- Toast on one sideDeliberate: the untoasted face stays soft and absorbs the sauce while the toasted underside keeps the slice from collapsing. Toast under a broiler rather than in a toaster to get one side only.
- YieldEnough sauce for four to six slices, though the tin of sardines will realistically cover four. Serve the moment it is poured; a rarebit sets and turns grainy as it cools.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American middle-class homes between about 1890 and the First World War, when a spirit lamp and a copper pan let a hostess cook at the table without servants, and cheese rarebits were its signature production. Welsh rarebit — the name generally traced to an eighteenth-century English joke about the Welsh having cheese instead of game — spawned a whole family of variants in these books: tomato rarebit, oyster rarebit, and this one, built on the tinned sardine. Canned sardines were cheap, keepable and faintly cosmopolitan, which made them a natural for the improvised late supper after cards or the theatre. The egg yolk and cream here mark it as a richer, more careful version than the beer-based Welsh original.