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Welsh Rarebits Without Beer or Ale
To half a pound of cheese use one egg, a gill of milk or cream (cream is the better), a tablespoonful of butter, a dash of cayenne pepper, a pinch of salt, and a mustard spoonful of well mixed mustard. Put the butter in the chafing dish with the cheese, cut in chips. When the cheese begins to melt, rub and stir it with a strong spoon until smooth. Then add the well-beaten egg and cream together with the other ingredients and when perfectly well blended serve on hot toast slightly moistened.
A chafing-dish supper standard from the era when the chafing dish sat on the sideboard of every fashionable household. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat.
- GillA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. With half a pound of cheese that gives a pourable rarebit rather than a stiff one.
- Mustard spoonfulThe mustard spoon in a Victorian condiment set held roughly half a teaspoon. "Well mixed mustard" means prepared mustard, English mustard powder slaked with water, not a dry powder stirred in at the end.
- Low heat is the whole recipeOnce the egg goes in, the mixture must never approach a simmer or it will break into curds and oil. If the chafing dish is set over its hot-water pan, it is doing the job of a double boiler; on a modern stove use the lowest burner setting or a bowl over barely steaming water.
- Choice of cheeseA firm aged cheddar, Cheshire or Lancashire melts best here. Skip pre-shredded cheese, which is coated in starch or cellulose and will go grainy. Cutting it in thin chips, as directed, matters, large chunks melt unevenly and tempt you to raise the heat.
- Temper the eggBeat the egg with the cream before adding, as written, and stir it in off the direct flame. Dropping a cold whole egg into hot cheese is the usual way this dish fails.
- If it separatesA splash more cold cream, off the heat, beaten hard, will usually bring it back. A teaspoon of cornstarch mixed into the cream at the start is cheap insurance.
- Moistened toastThe recipe says only 'slightly moistened' and does not say with what. The point is a light moistening rather than a soaking, so the bread does not dry out under the sauce without turning soggy.
- YieldHalf a pound of cheese serves four as a light supper or savoury, two if it is the whole meal.
Welsh rabbit, altered to "rarebit" in an eighteenth-century respelling, is generally traced to eighteenth-century England, where "Welsh" attached to cheese dishes as a joke, often said to be at the expense of a people too poor for meat. The classic version is bound with ale or beer, whose acidity helps keep the melted cheese smooth; a version explicitly "without beer or ale" is plausibly read as reflecting American temperance sentiment around 1900, when a recipe calling for drink was unwelcome in many households, and egg and cream stand in as the binder. Its placement among chafing-dish fare is no accident: the chafing dish was the great social utensil of the 1890s and 1900s, cooked at the table after the theatre or at a late supper, and rarebit, along with creamed oysters and lobster Newburg, was exactly the sort of dish a host could produce in front of guests without a kitchen.