Welsh rarebit

Welsh rabbit (original spelling) or Welsh rarebit (spelling based on folk etymology)[1][2] is a traditional British dish, often associated with Welsh cuisine. Welsh rarebit consists of 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 served in a chafing dish like a fondue.[3] The names of the dish originate from 18th-century Britain.[4] Despite these, the dish contains no rabbit meat. More often described with suffixes or choice of extras on menus, variants have been named English rabbit, Scotch rabbit, buck rabbit, golden buck, blushing bunny and in some parts of France (Lille and French Flanders) it is known as le/un welsh.

For the radio variety show, see Welsh Rarebit (radio programme).

Welsh rabbit
Alternative namesWelsh rarebit (folk etymology)
TypeSavoury
Place of originGreat Britain
VariationsBuck Rabbit, Blushing Bunny, Hot Brown

Sauce

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]

Variants

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.

Origin

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]

Welsh

The word Welsh may have been adopted because it carries a now-archaic sense in English to mean "foreign, non-native" — an etymological phenomenon seen in its ultimate ancestor, the Proto-Germanic walhaz ("foreigner") and many of its descendants like the dated sense of German welsch (Romance-speaker).[18] 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), writing "I am a Welshman, I do love cause boby, good roasted cheese."[19] Here "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". The word rarebit has no other use than in Welsh rabbit.[4][20]

"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 bread [...] . 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."[21]

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...."[22]

In his 1926 edition of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Fowler's style guide) grammarian H. W. Fowler opines: "Welsh Rabbit is amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong."[23]

In culture

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.

gollark: adb backup exists, I think.
gollark: To clarify, your enjoyment is mandatory.
gollark: Enjoy your calculation!
gollark: The bees told me that you Apioforms.
gollark: I see. Sounds like a convoluted way to do it.

See also

References
  1. "Welsh Rabbit - Definition of Welsh rabbit by Merriam-Webster".
  2. "Welsh rarebit - definition of Welsh rarebit in English from the Oxford dictionary".
  3. The Constance Spry Cookery Book by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume
  4. Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989.
  5. Le Guide Culinaire by Georges Auguste Escoffier, translated by H. L. Cracknell and R. J. Kaufmann
  6. Le Répertoire de la Cuisine by Louis Saulnier, translated by E. Brunet.
  7. Hering's Dictionary of Classical and Modern Cookery, edited and translated by Walter Bickel
  8. Recipes published on the labels of Lea and Perrins (Heinz) Worcestershire sauce,
  9. ""It takes more than beer to make a perfect rarebit"".
  10. Farmer, Fannie M., Boston Cooking-School Cook Book Boston, 1896, ISBN 0-451-12892-3
  11. Glasse, Hannah, The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, ...by a Lady (Posthumous edition, L. Wangford, London, c. 1770), p. 146. Online 1774 edition read here
  12. "Definition of "buck rabbit" - Collins English Dictionary".
  13. "Golden Buck - Definition of Golden buck by Merriam-Webster".
  14. Lily Haxworth Wallace, Rumford Chemical Works, The Rumford complete cookbook, 1908, full text, p. 196
  15. Evans, Max (30 June 2016). "Wales fans try the French Welsh rarebit". BBC.
  16. Stephens, M, 1986. Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, OUP
  17. Written recollections of the artist John Selway, 2013
  18. "Online Etymology Dictionary".
  19. Andrew Boorde: The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, the which do the teache a man to speak part of all manner of languages, and to know the usage and fashion of all manner of countreys (1542)
  20. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition (2006)
  21. "Hunting The Welch Rabbit, Hearth to Hearth Article, JOA&C May 2000 Issue".
  22. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, p. 592 at books.google.com (accessed 9 November 2007)
  23. Fowler, H. W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press, 1926
  24. In two known editions, one undated. W. Carew Hazlitt (Ed.), A Hundred Merry Tales: The Earliest English Jest-Book, facsimile (privately published, 1887), fol xxi, verso Read here. See also Hermann Oesterley (Ed.), Shakespeare's Jest Book. A Hundred Mery Talys, from the only perfect copy known (London 1866).
  25. Betty Crocker's Cookbook. Prentice Hall. 1989. p. 184.
  26. Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, 1911
  27. Simon, Neil (1969). Plaza Suite: A Comedy in Three Acts. Samuel French, Inc. p. 31. ISBN 9780573614071. neil simon plaza suite rarebit.
  28. Nast, Condé. "If There Was an Oscar for Best Food Scene, This Would Win". Bon Appétit. Retrieved 27 May 2019.
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