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Oyster Rarebit
1 cup oysters 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 lb. soft mild cheese, cut in small pieces ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 2 eggs Clean, parboil, and drain oysters, reserving liquor; then remove and discard tough muscle. Melt butter, add cheese and seasonings; as cheese melts, add gradually oyster liquor, and eggs slightly beaten . As soon as mixture is smooth, add soft part of oysters.
Serve on unsweetened wafer crackers or bread toasted on one side, rarebit being poured over untoasted side. 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour ¾ cup thin cream 3 3/4 cup stewed and strained tomatoes
A chafing-dish rarebit built on melted cheese, oyster liquor and egg — quick, but easily curdled if the heat gets away from you. Serves three or four as a supper dish.
- Keep the heat lowThis is the hinge. Cheese and beaten egg over direct flame will break into curds and oil in seconds. Use the water pan of the chafing dish, or a heavy saucepan on the lowest setting, and pull it off the heat the moment it turns smooth.
- Salt quantityThe salt reads as 14 teaspoon, which is a garbled quarter teaspoon. Cheese and oyster liquor both carry salt, so season at the end rather than the start.
- "Soft mild cheese""Soft mild cheese" here means a young, high-moisture cheese that melts without stringing — a mild American or a young Cheddar. Avoid aged Cheddar or anything pre-shredded with anti-caking starch; grate or dice it yourself.
- Parboiling the oystersBring them just to the point where the edges ruffle, no more than a minute or two, then lift them out. Held longer they tighten and go rubbery, and the whole point of adding them at the end is to keep them tender.
- The tough muscleThis is the adductor, the small pale disc on the side of the oyster. Check for it and pinch it off if present.
- Oyster liquorStrain the reserved liquor through a fine sieve or cloth; shucked oysters often carry grit. Add it gradually, as the recipe directs — it is the only liquid thinning the cheese.
- ServingToast on one side only so the untoasted face soaks up the rarebit while the toasted back holds its shape. Plain water crackers work equally well.
The rarebit — Welsh rabbit, in the older spelling, which is often said to have begun as a joke at the Welsh expense — was a tavern dish of melted cheese on toast that respectable Victorian cookery adopted wholesale, then began to elaborate. By the time Fannie Farmer was writing at the Boston Cooking School at the turn of the twentieth century, the chafing dish had become a fashionable piece of equipment for late suppers and college-room entertaining, and quick cheese-and-egg dishes grew up around it. Oysters were the natural addition in Boston: cheap, abundant along the New England coast, and sold shucked by the quart. Adding them to a rarebit turned a bachelor's snack into something fit to put in front of guests.