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Welsh Rabbit
(1) Chop fine one quarter of a pound of cooking-cheese, put it in a saucepan with two ounces of butter, and as the cheese gets warm and the butter melts, mash them together. When softened, add the yolks of two eggs, one-half teacupful of beer, and a small quantity of cayenne and salt. Stir until it becomes creamy, but do not permit it to boil, as that would spoil it. Place some slices of buttered toast on a dish, pour the Welsh rabbit over, and place in the oven for about two minutes before serving. Some persons prefer milk in place of beer. (2) Take one-fourth pound of cheese, and, if soft, break it into small pieces; but if hard, grate it. Place half a teacupful of milk in a double boiler and add the cheese. Mix one teaspoonful of mustard and a little cayenne, and one teaspoonful of salt, add an egg, and beat well. After the cheese has melted, add the egg mixture and one teaspoonful of butter; then cook for two minutes longer, or until it is done, taking care not to let it curdle. Pour the mixture over four slices of toast, free from crusts, and that have been kept warm, and then serve. Ale may be used in place of the milk, or cream, if preferred. (3) Cut up into small pieces one pound of American cheese, place them in a saucepan, pour over half a tumblerful of good ale, and season with half a saltspoonful of cayenne pepper. Stir with a wooden spoon continually over the fire until the mixture is well melted, which will take about ten minutes. Have previously prepared six large pieces of toast, arrange them on a very hot dish, pour over the preparation, spreading it equally, and serve very hot.
Three versions of the same dish, in ascending order of simplicity. All of them live or die on temperature: the cheese must melt, the egg must thicken, and nothing must boil.
- The hingeMelted cheese breaks into oil and rubbery curd the moment it simmers, and egg yolk scrambles a good deal below boiling. Keep the pan over low heat or set it in a double boiler, and pull it off while it still pours.
- Teacupful and tumblerfulA teacupful in this period is usually reckoned somewhere between a gill (4 fl oz) and 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup. A tumbler is commonly taken as about 8 fl oz, making half a tumblerful about 1/2 cup. A saltspoonful is generally 1/4 teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is a scant pinch of cayenne.
- "Cooking-cheese" and "American cheese"Neither term means processed slices here; American cheese at this date meant domestic cheese of the Cheddar type. A firm, well-aged cow's-milk cheese that melts smoothly is the safest reading, though version 2 explicitly allows a soft cheese as well as a hard one. A good aged Cheddar, or a Cheddar-Gruyere mix, works in all three versions; pre-shredded cheese with anti-caking starch does not melt as cleanly.
- Beer or aleUse something malty and not aggressively hoppy. Modern IPAs turn bitter as they reduce. A brown ale, mild or lager suits the dish better than anything heavily bittered.
- Version 1 and the eggsTwo yolks in a quarter pound of cheese make the richest and most fragile of the three. Add them off the direct heat and stir constantly. The recipe gives no oven temperature, and the two minutes at the end will do little more than heat the surface, so keep the oven hot and watch it.
- Version 3 timingTen minutes of stirring is longer than a pound of cheese needs over decent heat. Judge by the pan, not the clock: stop when the mass is glossy and homogeneous.
- ToastCut it thick and toast it hard on both sides. Thin or soft toast collapses into paste under the sauce within a minute.
- YieldVersions 1 and 2 serve two to four as a light supper; version 3, with a full pound of cheese and six slices of toast, serves four to six.
Welsh rabbit is recorded in English cookery from the early eighteenth century, and the name is generally taken as a piece of old English mockery -- a dish of melted cheese standing in for the meat a Welsh household was joked to lack; this is the usual explanation rather than a documented one. "Welsh rarebit" is a later genteel alteration of a name that was never a mistake; Oscar, writing for the Waldorf, keeps the blunt original. Its presence in a great hotel cookbook fits what is known of American after-theatre eating around 1900: the rabbit, along with the oyster stew and the chafing-dish lobster, was supper food, cooked at the table or sent up late, and the chafing dish itself was a fashionable middle-class possession.