Welsh rarebit or Welsh rabbit is a dish made with a savoury sauce of melted cheese and
various other ingredients and served hot, after being poured over slices of toasted
bread, or the hot cheese sauce may be served in a chafing dish like a fondue, accompanied
by sliced, toasted bread. The names of the dish originate from 18th-century Great Britain.
Welsh rarebit is typically made with Cheddar cheese, in contrast to the Continental European
fondue, which classically depends on Swiss cheeses.
Various recipes for Welsh rarebit include the addition of ale, mustard, ground cayenne
pepper or ground paprika and Worcestershire sauce. The sauce may also be made by blending
cheese and mustard into a Béchamel sauce or Mornay sauce. Some recipes for Welsh rarebit
have become textbook savoury dishes listed by culinary authorities including Escoffier,
Saulnier and others, who tend to use the form Welsh rarebit, emphasizing that it is not
a meat dish. In the United States, a frozen prepared sauce
sold under the Stouffer's brand name can be found in supermarkets.
Acknowledging that there is more than one way to make a rarebit, some cookbooks have
included two recipes: the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 provides one béchamel-based
recipe and another with beer, Le Guide Culinaire of 1907 has one with ale and one without,
and the Constance Spry Cookery Book of 1956 has one with flour and one without.
Variants Mrs Glasse, in her cookbook The Art of Cookery,
gives recipes for "Scotch rabbit", "Welch rabbit" and two versions of "English rabbit".
To make a Scotch rabbit, toast the bread very nicely on both sides, butter it, cut a slice
of cheese about as big as the bread, toast it on both sides, and lay it on the bread.
To make a Welch rabbit, toast the bread on both sides, then toast the cheese on one side,
lay it on the toast, and with a hot iron brown the other side. You may rub it over with mustard.
To make an English rabbit, toast the bread brown on both sides, lay it in a plate before
the fire, pour a glass of red wine over it, and let it soak the wine up. Then cut some
cheese very thin and lay it very thick over the bread, put it in a tin oven before the
fire, and it will be toasted and browned presently. Serve it away hot.
Or do it thus. Toast the bread and soak it in the wine, set it before the fire, rub butter
over the bottom of a plate, lay the cheese on, pour in two or three spoonfuls of white
wine, cover it with another plate, set it over a chafing-dish of hot coals for two or
three minutes, then stir it till it is done and well mixed. You may stir in a little mustard;
when it is enough lay it on the bread, just brown it with a hot shovel.
Served with an egg on top, a Welsh rarebit is known as a buck rabbit or a golden buck.
Kentucky Hot Brown is a variant that adds turkey and bacon to the traditional rarebit
recipe. Welsh rarebit blended with tomato is known
as Blushing Bunny. Origin of the names
The first recorded reference to the dish was "Welsh rabbit" in 1725, but the origin of
the term is unknown. Welsh
The word Welsh may have been adopted because it was used by the English to mean "foreign"
or "inferior". It is also possible that the dish was attributed to the Welsh because they
were considered particularly fond of cheese, as evidenced by Andrew Boorde in his Fyrst
Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, when he wrote "I am a Welshman, I do love cause
boby, good roasted cheese." In Boorde's account, "cause boby" is the Welsh caws pobi, meaning
"baked cheese", but whether it implies a recipe like Welsh rarebit is a matter of speculation.
Rarebit The word rarebit is a corruption of rabbit,
"Welsh rabbit" being first recorded in 1725 and the variant "Welsh rarebit" being first
recorded in 1785 by Francis Grose. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'Welsh rarebit'
is an "etymologizing alteration. There is no evidence of the independent use of rarebit".
"Eighteenth-century English cookbooks reveal that it was then considered to be a luscious
supper or tavern dish, based on the fine cheddar-type cheeses and the wheat breads [...] . Surprisingly,
it seems there was not only a Welsh Rabbit, but also an English Rabbit, an Irish and a
Scotch Rabbit, but nary a rarebit." Michael Quinion writes: "Welsh rabbit is basically
cheese on toast". The entry in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary
of English Usage is "Welsh rabbit, Welsh rarebit" and states: "When Francis Grose defined Welsh
rabbit in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785, he mistakenly indicated that
rabbit was a corruption of rarebit. It is not certain that this erroneous idea originated
with Grose...." In his 1926 edition of the Dictionary of Modern
English Usage, the grammarian H. W. Fowler states a forthright view: "Welsh Rabbit is
amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong."
The word rarebit has no other use than in Welsh rabbit and "rarebit" alone has come
to be used in place of the original name. Legends and humour
The notion that toasted cheese was a favourite dish irresistible to the Welsh has existed
since the Middle Ages. In A C Merie Talys, a printed book of jokes of 1526 AD, it is
told that God became weary of all the Welshmen in heaven, 'which with their krakynge and
babelynge trobelyd all the others', and asked the Porter of Heaven Gate, St Peter, to do
something about it. So St Peter went outside the gates and called in a loud voice ' Cause
bobe, yt is as moche to say as rostyd chese ': at which all the Welshmen ran out, and
when St Peter saw they were all outside, he went in and locked the gates, which is why
there are no Welshmen in heaven. The 1526 compiler says he found this story 'Wryten
amonge olde gestys'. A legend mentioned in Betty Crocker's Cookbook
claims that Welsh peasants were not allowed to eat rabbits caught in hunts on the estates
of the nobility, so they used melted cheese as a substitute. The cookbook writes that
Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens ate Welsh rarebit at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub in London.
There is no good evidence for any of this; what is more, Ben Jonson died almost a century
before the term Welsh rabbit is first attested. According to the American satirist Ambrose
Bierce, the continued use of rarebit was an attempt to rationalise the absence of rabbit,
writing in his 1911 Devil's Dictionary: "RAREBIT n. A Welsh rabbit, in the speech of the humorless,
who point out that it is not a rabbit. To whom it may be solemnly explained that the
comestible known as toad in the hole is really not a toad, and that ris de veau à la financière
is not the smile of a calf prepared after the recipe of a she-banker."
American cartoonist Winsor McCay had an intriguing insight into the effects of the Welsh rarebit
where characters often awoke from dreams after eating the dish. His comic strip titled Dream
of the Rarebit Fiend was published in newspapers from 1904 to 1925, and made into a silent
movie of the same name in 1906. See also
References