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Rarebit
cup milk or cream 2 cups or lb. cheese 2 tablespoons butter 1 egg teaspoon salt. sprinkle cayenne Put milk and grated cheese in upper part of double boiler, or blazer of chafing dish. When cheese is melted, add butter. Pour this mixture over egg, slightly beaten, then return to double boiler. Add seasoning. Stir constantly, and cook until smooth and thick. Serve at once, over slices of toast, or hot crisp crackers.
A plain milk-and-egg rarebit, thickened over water rather than direct heat. The transcription has lost most of its fractions, so read the quantities with care.
- Missing fractionsThe printed figures have dropped their fractions in transcription. The '2 cups or ___ lb. cheese' was most likely '1/2 lb.', since 2 cups grated is roughly half a pound; the milk and salt quantities cannot be recovered with confidence. Treat all the figures as approximate rather than literal.
- CheeseTwo cups grated is about 8 oz. A firm aged Cheddar is the traditional choice; something young and rubbery will string instead of melting smooth. Grate it rather than cubing it so it goes in fast and evenly.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe double boiler is not a formality. Cheese and egg above roughly 180F will curdle into grainy curds swimming in fat, and no amount of stirring brings it back. Keep the water below a simmer and the bowl off the water's surface.
- Tempering the eggPouring the hot cheese mixture over the beaten egg, as written, is deliberate — it raises the egg gently instead of scrambling it. Add the hot mixture in a thin stream while whisking, then return the lot to the boiler.
- Blazer of a chafing dishThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set over a spirit lamp or over the water pan. A stainless bowl over a saucepan of hot water does the same job.
- Cayenne and mustardA sprinkle of cayenne is the only heat given. Many period rarebits also take a half teaspoon of dry mustard and a splash of Worcestershire, both of which sharpen the cheese considerably.
- Serving and yieldRoughly enough to sauce three or four slices of toast, depending on how generously it is spooned. It thickens and skins over as it cools, so make the toast first and sauce it as soon as the mixture coats the spoon.
- Why no beerThis is the milk version. If you substitute ale or beer for the milk you will need to cook it a little longer to take the raw edge off, and the egg becomes more prone to curdling.
Welsh rabbit -- rarebit is the later respelling -- appears in English print from the early eighteenth century. The name is usually explained as a joke at the expense of a household with no game to put on the table, but that reading is traditional rather than documented. By the time this book was printed it had become a chafing-dish staple, cooked at the table in front of guests, which is why the instructions offer the blazer as an alternative to the double boiler. American home-economics writing of the period commonly classed cheese, eggs and legumes as protein stand-ins for meat and costed them against it by the pound -- a way of thinking that grew sharply more practical during the food-conservation campaigns of the First World War.