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Baked Welsh Rabbit
Cut six slices of bread, toast slightly, cover with Gruyere cheese cut into slices a little less than one-half an inch thick, and lay them in a roasting pan, sprinkling over pepper and salt to taste, and cover with browned breadcrumbs. Place the pan in the oven for about ten minutes. Arrange the toast on a hot dish, and serve.
Welsh Rabbit, Oscar Style For one rabbit, take a quarter of a pound of good American cheese, cut it in small pieces, take also a pinch of Paprika pepper, a pinch of powdered English mustard and about half a wineglassful of Rhine wine and half a wineglassful of Bass ale. Cook the whole together on a hot stove until the rabbit is well dissolved, and serve it with a piece of toast in a very hot dish.
Two versions sit side by side here: a baked, gratin-style rabbit and Oscar's stovetop one. Both hinge on gentle, patient heat — cheese driven hard breaks into oil and rubber.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderately hot oven, 375–400F, should melt the Gruyère and colour the crumbs in the ten minutes specified; hotter and the cheese risks separating before the top browns.
- A wineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, so Oscar's quarter pound of cheese takes roughly 2 tablespoons each of wine and ale. That is a small amount of liquid deliberately — it should loosen the cheese, not thin it to soup.
- "American cheese"In 1896 this meant a domestic factory Cheddar, firm and sharp, not the processed slice sold under the name today. Use a good aged Cheddar; processed cheese will melt smoothly but tastes of nothing.
- Rhine wineA dry German white — Riesling or Silvaner. Anything off-dry will make the rabbit cloying against the ale.
- "On a hot stove"This is the instruction that matters. Melt the cheese over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring constantly, and take it off the moment it is smooth. Boiling makes it grainy and stringy, and it will not come back.
- Bass aleStill made, and still the right character: an English pale ale with some bitterness. Any bottled bitter or pale ale works; avoid heavily hopped IPAs, which turn harsh when reduced.
- Cheese thickness in the baked versionSlices just under half an inch are thick by modern habit and are meant to be — the bread underneath is only lightly toasted and needs to stay crisp under a substantial cap of cheese.
- Browned breadcrumbsDry crumbs toasted in a pan or in the oven beforehand, not fresh. Fresh crumbs will absorb the melting cheese and go pasty.
- YieldThe baked version serves six as a savoury or three as a light supper. Oscar's stovetop version, at a quarter pound of cheese, is one serving over one round of toast.
Welsh rabbit — the older and more defensible spelling, with "rarebit" a later genteel correction — is an English joke name of the eighteenth century, though what the joke was is disputed: the cheese is often said to stand in for the meat a poor man could not afford, while a mocking of the Welsh is at least as common a reading. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms it had become a fixture of the American late supper and after-theatre menu, cooked at the table in a chafing dish, which may account for the very small quantities and the single portion of the second version. The pairing of ale and mustard with the cheese is traditional to the English original; the Rhine wine and paprika are typical of a kitchen that liked to put a continental hand on an Anglo-American dish. The baked version above, with its sliced Gruyère and browned crumbs, is really a gratin and shows how loosely the name was applied.