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Cheese Dishes (Hot toasted bread or if this)
on hot toasted bread or, if this is not at hand, crisp crackers form a good substitute.
WELSH RAREBIT (with Eggs) -Ingredients: One cup of grated cheese; one egg (yolk only); one-fourth cup of milk; salt and pepper to taste. Prepare the toast the same as in the preceding recipe. Place the milk in a porcelain-lined saucepan, and when hot, put in the cheese, and stir continually until the latter is melted. Add the salt, pepper and the beaten yolk, stir but a moment, and pour the liquid over the toast.
WELSH RAREBIT (with Ale) - This is the way a rarebit is generally prepared in England: One pound of cheese; one-half tablespoon of butter; one wine-glass of ale. Put the butter and ale in a porcelain-lined saucepan, and when hot, stir in the cheese cut into dice. Stir and cook until all are blended to a smooth paste. Prepare the toast as above, pour this mixture over it, and serve very hot.
Two versions of the same dish, one thickened with egg yolk and one loosened with ale. Both live or die by heat control.
- The hinge: low heat, never a boilCheese held above roughly 160F breaks, going stringy with a slick of orange fat. Keep the pan over the lowest possible flame, or set it in a bowl over barely simmering water, and pull it the moment the mass is smooth.
- A wine-glass of aleIn this period a wine-glass is usually taken as about 2 fluid ounces, roughly a quarter cup. For a full pound of cheese that is barely enough to loosen the paste; the recipe has the ale in the pan from the start, so if the mixture seems stiff, hold a little back and add it until the mixture flows.
- Porcelain-lined saucepanMeaning enameled ironware, chosen because bare iron, copper and later aluminum discolor a milk-and-cheese sauce and can give it a metallic edge. Any modern enameled or stainless pan does the job.
- Which cheeseThe recipe says only "cheese"; a firm aged English type such as sharp Cheddar, Cheshire or Double Gloucester suits it. Grate it even in the ale version, despite the instruction to dice, since grated cheese melts before the pan has time to overheat.
- The egg yolkStir a spoonful of the hot cheese into the beaten yolk first, then return it to the pan, off the heat. Added cold and directly, it scrambles into threads before it can thicken anything.
- AleAn English-style bitter or brown ale, ideally flat and at room temperature; a cold, heavily carbonated beer chills the pan and foams. Avoid anything aggressively hoppy, which turns bitter as it reduces.
- SaltA pound of aged Cheddar carries a great deal of salt already. Season at the end, after tasting.
- YieldThe egg version covers two or three slices of toast and serves two. The ale version, with a full pound of cheese, serves four generously and does not reheat well once it has set.
Welsh rabbit appears in print in the 1720s as exactly that, a rabbit, the joke being generally traced to the idea that melted cheese on toast was as near to meat as a poor Welsh household got; "rarebit" is a later genteel respelling that stuck so firmly it became the standard spelling in American cookbooks like this one. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for middle-class American housekeepers, gives the milk-and-egg version first and flags the ale version as "the way a rarebit is generally prepared in England" — for thoroughly the dish had been domesticated on this side of the Atlantic, where dairy stood in for the beer. Chafing-dish suppers were fashionable when this was written, and rarebit was their signature dish: it needed one pan, no oven, and could be made at the table.