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Welsh Rabbit
1 tablespoon butter
¼ teaspoon mustard
1 tablespoon flour
¼ to 1 pound of cheese
1 cup milk
(acccording to richness de- ½ teaspoon salt sired) shaved or cut fine
Few grains pepper
6 slices buttered toast
Make a white sauce, in the top of a double boiler, of the first six ingredients, mixing the mustard with the other dry ingredients. Set the top part of the boiler over hot but not boiling water. Add the cheese, cook and stir until it is melted. Serve on hot toasted bread or on saltines. One-half cup chopped olives may be added. This dish may be varied by adding one or two slightly beaten eggs just after the cheese has melted and continuing the cooking until the egg has thickened the mixture.
A white-sauce rabbit rather than the beer-and-cheese kind, which makes it far more forgiving. The ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column setting; read it as butter, flour, milk, salt, pepper and mustard for the sauce, then cheese and toast.
- The list, untangled1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 cup milk, ½ teaspoon salt, a few grains pepper, ¼ teaspoon mustard, ¼ to 1 pound cheese, 6 slices buttered toast. The parenthetical "according to richness desired" belongs to the cheese, not the milk.
- MustardThis means dry English mustard powder, whisked into the flour and salt before the milk goes in. Prepared jarred mustard will work but thins the sauce slightly and tastes sharper.
- The cheese, and how muchA quarter pound to a cup of milk gives a sauce; a full pound gives something close to a fondue that will need eating fast. Half a pound is the sensible middle. Use a well-aged Cheddar or a Cheshire, grated rather than cubed so it melts before the sauce overheats.
- The hinge: hot but not boilingThe instruction to set the pan over hot water once the cheese goes in is the whole recipe. Above roughly 160F the cheese proteins tighten and squeeze out their fat, and the rabbit turns into stringy curds in an oil slick. Off the heat entirely, stirring, is safer than a hard simmer.
- Pre-shredded cheeseBagged shreds are coated with starch or cellulose to stop caking, which makes a slightly grainy sauce. Grate from a block.
- The egg variationTemper the beaten eggs with a spoonful of the hot sauce before adding them, and keep the pan over the hot water only. Added cold and straight in, they scramble in threads.
- ToastToast it dry and hard, and butter it at the last moment. Soft or freshly buttered bread goes soggy quickly under the sauce.
- YieldSix slices, so four to six as a light supper or savoury course. It is best eaten straight away; reheated, the sauce is apt to break.
Welsh rabbit — the "rarebit" spelling is a later genteel correction of what began as a joke, the cheese standing in for the meat a Welshman supposedly could not afford — appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward and had become a fixture of American supper tables by the time Butterick issued this collection. The version here is telling: no ale, no Worcestershire, no chafing dish at the table, just a béchamel with cheese stirred through it over a double boiler. That is the domestic-science approach of the period, which distrusted the tavern original and rebuilt the dish on the white sauce that household manuals of the era commonly taught first. The double boiler was the standard tool for anything that would curdle, and the note about olives, and the egg-thickened variation, are the kind of small elaborations a magazine kitchen offered to make one cheap dish serve several occasions.