Welsh rarebit

Buck rarebit (Welsh rarebit with an egg)

Variations:

Buck Rabbit, Blushing Bunny, Hot Brown

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 (or other pieces) 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
Welshrarebit, emphasising 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 (first published in 1747 and last published in 1843), 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 (or tomato soup) 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 (1542), 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. (See 1526 in Humour below.)

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 word is not 'rarebit' by the way, that's
the result of false etymology; 'rabbit' is here being used in the same way as 'turtle' in 'mock-turtle soup',
which has never been near a turtle, or 'duck' in 'Bombay duck', which was actually a dried fish called
bummalo)".

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 Tonguein 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 (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'

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 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend).