Welsh rarebit

Its recipes include the addition of ale, mustard, ground cayenne pepper, paprika[5][6][7] wine and/or Worcestershire sauce.[8][9] The sauce may also blend cheese and mustard into a Béchamel sauce.[3][10] Some recipes have become textbook savouries listed by culinary authorities including Auguste Escoffier, Louis Saulnier and others, who tend to use the form Welsh rarebit, more strongly communicating to a non-English audience that it is not a meat dish.

Acknowledging that there is more than one way for its making, cookbooks have included two recipes: the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 provides one béchamel-based recipe and another with beer;[10] Le Guide Culinaire of 1907 has one with ale and one without;[5] the Constance Spry Cookery Book of 1956 has one with flour and one without.[3]

Hannah Glasse, in her 1747 cookbook The Art of Cookery, gives close variants "Scotch rabbit", "Welsh rabbit" and two versions of "English rabbit".[11]

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 Welsh 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 always 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 enough lays it on the bread, just brown it with a hot shovel.

Buck rarebit (Welsh rarebit with an egg)

Served with an egg on top, it makes a buck rabbit[12] or a golden buck.[13]

Welsh rarebit blended with tomato (or tomato soup) makes a blushing bunny.[14]

Its analogue le/un Welsh is traditionally served in Nord-Pas-de-Calais,[15] and Côte d'Opale French regions.

The first recorded reference to the dish was "Welsh rabbit" in 1725, but the origin of the term is unknown.[4]

There is some suggestion that it derives from a South Wales Valleys staple, in which a generous lump of cheese is placed into a mixture of beaten eggs and milk, seasoned with salt and pepper, and baked in the oven until the egg mixture has firmed and the cheese has melted. Onion may be added and the mixture would be eaten with bread and butter and occasionally with the vinegar from pickled beetroot.[16][17]

The notion that toasted cheese was a favourite dish irresistible to the Welsh has existed since the Middle Ages. In A C Merie Talys (100 Merry Tales), a printed book of jokes of 1526 AD (of which William Shakespeare made some use), 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'.[24]

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 author also claims that Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens ate Welsh rarebit at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub in London.[25] 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.[4]

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."[26]

In H. G. Wells's 1898 short story "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" Mr. Fotheringay helps himself to a couple of Welsh rarebits "out of vacancy".

The comic strip "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend", by Winsor McCay, featured the fantastic dreams that various characters had because they ate a Welsh rarebit before going to bed.

In "Gomer, the Welsh Rarebit Fiend", Season 3 Episode 24 of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., indulging in Welsh rarebit causes Gomer (and later Sgt. Carter) to sleepwalk.

In the Neil Simon play Plaza Suite, in Act I, character Karen Nash offers Miss McCormack a Welsh rarebit, in an effort to disrupt an impromptu meeting between her and Sam Nash, Karen's husband.[27]

In the film Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017), Reynolds Woodcock orders a Welsh rarebit for breakfast with a poached egg, bacon, scones, butter, jam (not strawberry), sausages and Lapsang tea.[28]

In the first book of the Hardy Boys mystery stories, The Tower Treasure (1927), on page 25, Chet offers to make a side dish of Welsh Rabbit.