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Baked-Bean Rarebit
1 tablespoonful butter 1 cup grated cheese 1 cup milk 1 cup baked beans, mashed 1 egg slightly beaten A little salt and mixed mustard Slices of Boston brown bread toast Have the toast ready and hot. Cook in a saucepan, or chafing-dish over hot water. Melt the cheese in the hot butter. Add the seasoning and then the milk gradually, stirring until perfectly smooth. Then add the mashed beans and slightly beaten egg. Pour at once over the hot toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish that stretches leftover beans with cheese. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: this is a custard as much as a rarebit, and direct flame will curdle it.
- The "I" is a 1The typography of the original renders every figure 1 as a capital I. Read it as one tablespoon butter, one cup grated cheese, one cup milk, one cup mashed beans, one egg.
- Hot water, not direct heatUse the top of a double boiler or a bowl over barely simmering water. Cheese and egg over a bare burner will break into strings and grains within a minute.
- Mixed mustardThis means prepared mustard paste, not dry powder — the period term for mustard already mixed with water or vinegar. About half a teaspoon is enough against a cup of cheese.
- The cheeseThe recipe does not name a cheese; a rarebit of this date would usually have used a firm aged Cheddar or a store cheese of similar type. Grate it, and add it to the melted butter off the boil so it softens rather than seizes.
- Milk in stagesAdding the milk gradually and stirring is not optional politeness; poured in at once it will separate the melted cheese. Bring the mixture to a smooth, coating consistency before the beans go in.
- The egg last, and brieflyThe recipe adds the beaten egg with the beans and then says to pour at once. If you prefer, beat the egg with a spoonful of the hot mixture before stirring it in, and keep any further cooking brief over the water bath -- longer and you get scrambled egg in bean sauce.
- Baked beansBoston-style beans in molasses and salt pork are the likely intention, given the brown bread; canned baked beans work well. Mash them well, or press through a sieve if you want the sauce smooth.
- Boston brown bread toastThe steamed rye-and-cornmeal loaf, dark and slightly sweet. It toasts best in slices about half an inch thick, under a broiler rather than in a slot toaster, since it is dense and moist. Ordinary wholemeal toast is a fair substitute.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities make a generous amount of sauce, enough for several slices of toast. It must be served the moment it is poured; it stiffens as it cools.
Welsh rarebit reached American chafing-dish cookery in the late nineteenth century as the standard dish of the informal late supper, cooked at the table by the hostess rather than in the kitchen by the cook, and by 1900 cookbooks were fielding dozens of variants orarebit \, tomato rarebit, oyster rarebit, and this one. The economy of it is the point: a cup of Saturday-night baked beans, mashed into a cheese sauce and poured over brown bread, disappears completely. Beans and Boston brown bread were the fixed New England Saturday supper, generally traced to the Puritan practice of cooking ahead so that nothing need be done on the Sabbath, which meant that Sunday and Monday households routinely faced exactly the surplus this recipe consumes.