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Welsh Rarebits
The secret of success consists in pouring the cheese over the toast, the instant the cheese melts, and before the albumen in it hardens and the mixture curdles. A glass of cream is mixed with half a pound of cheese, which must be cut in fine bits. Different authorities differ. English cooks prefer a "fat old cheese," but Americans use fresh dairy cream cheese. After melting the cheese, add an even teaspoonful of mustard and butter the size of an egg, and spread the mixture over moderately thin but not dry toast.
The addition of a poached egg over the cheese makes a "golden buck."
The simplest form of a Welsh rarebit consists of melted cheese poured over toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish reduced to its essentials. The one thing the original insists on — speed at the moment of melting — is genuinely the whole recipe.
- The hinge: low heat, short timeCheese held over direct heat past the melting point separates into stringy curds and a pool of oil. Melt it in a heavy pan over the lowest possible heat, or in a double boiler, stirring constantly, and get it onto the toast the moment it flows. The book's talk of "albumen hardening" is imprecise chemistry but exactly right in practice: casein tightens and squeezes out fat.
- "A glass of cream"An imprecise period measure: a glass or wineglassful is variously reckoned at anything from 2 to 4 fl oz. With half a pound of cheese the smaller reading gives a thick, spoonable sauce rather than a pourable one; a little more cream loosens it without harm.
- "Fresh dairy cream cheese"Read it as a fresh, mild, whole-milk dairy cheese rather than the modern block cream cheese; a young cheddar or a mild Colby will do. The English "fat old cheese" most likely means a well-aged cheese of the cheddar type, sharper and much more prone to separating, so it needs even gentler heat.
- "Butter the size of an egg"About 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Add it off the heat at the end, in pieces, for gloss.
- MustardAn even teaspoonful; the book does not say whether powdered or prepared, though dry mustard powder is the usual reading for a dish of this kind. It is not just seasoning — mustard contains mucilage that helps hold the sauce together.
- The toast"Moderately thin but not dry" is a real instruction. Bread toasted to brittleness shatters under the sauce; toast that is soft in the centre absorbs it. Toast it just before serving and do not butter it.
- Golden buckPoach the egg while the cheese melts and set it on top, so the yolk runs into the sauce. A soft-poached egg is undercooked by modern standards; use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised.
- YieldHalf a pound of cheese sauces four to six slices of toast — a light supper for two to three, or a savoury course for four.
Welsh rarebit is recorded in English cookery from the early eighteenth century as "Welsh rabbit"; the point of the joke is not certainly known, though it is usually explained as mockery of a household too poor for meat. "Rarebit" appears later and is generally taken as a genteel respelling that tried to explain the pun away. By 1900 it had become a fixture of the American chafing-dish craze — the late supper cooked at the table over a spirit lamp, after the theatre or at the end of a card party. The variants collected in this entry, the poached-egg "golden buck" among them, belong to that fashion rather than to Wales, and the author's hedging between the English "fat old cheese" and the American fresh dairy cheese suggests a period when the two countries' cheeses had diverged.