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Welsh Rarebit (Grate a pound of full-creamed)
Grate a pound of full-creamed, mild American cheese, no other will give satisfaction. Melt a tablespoonful of butter in the cutlet dish; when the butter greases the bottom of the dish add the cheese, and as it melts stir with a wooden spoon; add a tablespoonful of ale every few minutes until four or five are used. Cook ten minutes; serve on toast. This is sufficient for four persons. Do not make the mistake of putting large pieces of cheese into the dish. The rarebit will be lumpy. Mustard, etc., should not be added while preparing; let individual taste be consulted after the dish is cooked.
The addition of a tablespoonful of Chili, Colorado or paprika to the dish while it is cooking has been found to be an aid to the digestibility of the rarebit.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when the chafing dish was the fashionable piece of equipment in an American household. The method is sound; the main translations needed are the cheese and the vessel.
- The cheese"Full-creamed, mild American cheese" here means a young, whole-milk factory cheddar, not the individually wrapped processed slices sold under that name now. Buy a mild yellow cheddar aged no more than a few months; sharp aged cheddar breaks and turns greasy under heat.
- Cutlet dishA shallow metal or earthenware pan; in this period such a pan was often the blazer of a chafing-dish set, heated over a spirit lamp. A heavy-bottomed skillet or small saucepan over the lowest burner setting does the same job.
- Keep it below a simmerThis is the hinge. Cheese proteins tighten and squeeze out fat above roughly 160F, giving a stringy mass in a pool of grease. Low, patient heat and constant stirring are what the recipe's fussiness about grating and small additions of ale is really protecting.
- Ten minutesRead that as an outer limit rather than a target. A pound of grated cheese over gentle heat is usually smooth and pourable in five to eight minutes; take it off as soon as it flows off the spoon in a sheet.
- The aleFour or five tablespoons for a pound of cheese is a small amount, added in stages to loosen the mass without shocking it. An English-style ale or brown ale suits it; the recipe is not looking for a thin sauce.
- "Chili, Colorado or paprika"These are ground dried red chile powders of the period, "Colorado" being a trade name for red chile (from Spanish chile colorado), generally mild. A tablespoon of a mild, pure ground chile or sweet paprika is the intent, not a tablespoon of modern blended chili powder with its cumin and oregano. The claim about digestibility is period folk belief, not fact.
- Yield and servingStated as four portions, which is generous. Have thick toast cut and waiting before the cheese goes into the pan; rarebit stiffens quickly as it cools and does not reheat well.
The dish is much older than this book and its name has been argued over for centuries: eighteenth-century sources give it as "Welsh rabbit," often said to be a joke at the expense of people too poor for meat, with "rarebit" appearing later as a genteel correction that stuck in American cookbooks. What makes this version distinctly of its moment is the equipment. Around 1900 the chafing dish was a middle-class enthusiasm in the United States, with whole cookbooks devoted to it, and rarebit was its signature performance: cooked at the table after the theatre or at a late supper, in company, in a room where nobody wanted to go back to the kitchen. The insistence on a specific mild factory cheese also marks the period, when American cheddar had become an industrial product uniform enough for a writer to assume readers could buy the same thing anywhere.