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Welsh Rarebit with Ale
INGREDIENTS.
1 tablespoonful of butter.
Generous 1/2 a pound of soft American cheese, broken into bits.
1 egg. 1/3 a teaspoonful of salt.
1 teaspoonful of mustard.
A few grains of cayenne. 1/2 a cup of ale.
Method.-Put the butter into the chafing-dish (using the bath); when melted, add the cheese and ale. Mix the salt, mustard and cayenne, add the egg, and beat thoroughly. When the cheese is melted, add the egg mixture and let cook until it thickens. Serve as before.
A chafing-dish rarebit is a custard as much as a cheese sauce, and it lives or dies on gentle heat. The whole method can be moved to a double boiler over barely simmering water.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe egg is what thickens this, and direct or fast heat will scramble it into grainy threads with a pool of fat beneath. Keep the water beneath at a bare simmer and stir constantly until the mixture coats the spoon.
- "Using the bath"Chafing dishes came with a hot-water pan that sat between the flame and the blazer. Set a heatproof bowl or the top of a double boiler over an inch of simmering water, not touching it.
- "Soft American cheese"This means a young, mild, moist factory Cheddar of the period, not processed cheese slices. A mild yellow Cheddar aged under six months melts smoothly; well-aged Cheddar breaks and turns oily. Grate or shred rather than breaking into bits so it melts before the egg goes in.
- MustardA teaspoonful of dry mustard powder is most likely what is meant, and it is a large amount for half a pound of cheese. Prepared mustard will work but adds vinegar and liquid, and you will need rather more of it by volume.
- The aleHalf a cup, and the beer's character comes straight through. A mild English-style ale or brown ale suits it; a modern heavily hopped IPA turns the finished rarebit bitter.
- Tempering the eggThe original beats the seasonings into the raw egg and adds it to hot melted cheese. Stir a spoonful or two of the hot cheese mixture into the egg first, then return it all to the pan, and the risk of curdling drops considerably.
- "Serve as before"The phrase refers back to the serving directions of the preceding rarebit recipes, which in books of this kind means pouring it over toast. Serve immediately on hot toast; it stiffens badly as it cools and reheats poorly.
- YieldHalf a pound of cheese and half a cup of ale makes enough for four small servings as a savoury, or two as a supper dish.
Welsh rarebit is recorded in English cookery from the early eighteenth century as "Welsh rabbit," and "rarebit" is a later genteel respelling of the name; the usual explanation, that the joke was melted cheese standing in for the meat a poor Welsh household would not see, is traditional rather than documented, and the origin of the phrase is not settled. It reached American cookbooks as a chafing-dish standard because it suited exactly what the chafing dish was for: a hot dish made at the table, after the theatre or at a late supper, without a cook or a kitchen fire. Books of this kind treat the chafing dish as a piece of social equipment, and rarebit — cheese, beer, mustard, toast — was among the dishes most associated with it. The addition of an egg, as here, is one common way of helping the sauce hold together instead of separating into stringy cheese and liquid.