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Swiss Rarebit
Finely chop ten ounces rich, crustless Swiss cheese. Place a gill white wine in saucepan and as soon as it comes to a boil add the cheese, with a saltspoon cayenne pepper and two teaspoons Worcestershire sauce. Briskly mix with wooden spoon until thoroughly melted, add three egg yolks and sharply mix while heating for three minutes. Heat six individual shirred-egg dishes, place six freshly prepared crustless toasts, evenly divide the prepared cheese in them and immediately send to table.
A fondue in all but name, served over toast rather than dipped. The whole dish stands or falls on temperature control.
- Keep it below a simmerOnce the cheese goes into the wine the pan should never boil again, and least of all after the yolks are added. Above roughly 160-170F the yolks scramble and the cheese proteins tighten and weep fat, leaving a grainy pool under a rubbery mass. Low heat, constant motion with the wooden spoon.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Use a dry white with real acidity — a Swiss Fendant, a Muscadet, a dry Riesling. The acid is functional, not decorative: it keeps the melted cheese smooth rather than stringy.
- A saltspoonAbout a quarter teaspoon, sometimes reckoned as an eighth. With cayenne, start at an eighth and taste.
- "Swiss cheese"In 1906 this means Emmental or Gruyere, not the pre-sliced sandwich cheese sold under the name today. Gruyere melts more smoothly; a mix of the two is the classic fondue blend. Ten ounces grated coarsely will behave better than chopped.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ovenproof dishes, roughly ramekin-sized but wider — a 5-inch gratin dish or a individual pie plate works. Heating them first is not fussiness; cold china will set the cheese into a skin before the dish reaches the table.
- The toastCut crusts off and toast just before serving. Thin bread will collapse under the sauce, so use a sturdy country loaf sliced about half an inch thick.
- Yield and timingSix small servings as a savoury or lunch course, three as a main. There is no holding this dish — it must go out within a minute or two of the yolks going in.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), where the chef long associated with Delmonico's set out to give American households a dish from more or less every kitchen he could name. The "rarebit" label is borrowed from the English Welsh rabbit — melted cheese on toast — rarebit being an alteration of rabbit recorded from the late eighteenth century and widely adopted thereafter. What Filippini actually describes, though, is closer to Swiss fondue: cheese melted into white wine, thickened here with egg yolks, but decanted over toast for a table that expected its cheese served in individual dishes rather than communally out of a caquelon. The Worcestershire sauce is the giveaway that this is an Anglo-American reading of a Swiss dish rather than a Swiss one; it belongs firmly to the rarebit side of the family.