Welsh rarebit, also spelled Welsh rabbit,
Though there is no strong evidence that the dish originated in Welsh cuisine, it is sometimes identified with the Welsh dish caws pobi, documented in the 1500s.
Sauce
Some recipes simply melt grated cheese on toast, making it identical to cheese on toast. Others make the sauce of cheese,
ale, and mustard, and garnished with
cayenne pepper or
paprika.
[Escoffier, Le Guide Culinaire, translated by H. L. Cracknell and R. J. Kaufmann][Louis Saulnier, Le Répertoire de la Cuisine, translated by E. Brunet.][ Hering's Dictionary of Classical and Modern Cookery, edited and translated by Walter Bickel] Other recipes add wine or Worcestershire sauce.
[Recipes published on the labels of Lea and Perrins (Heinz) Worcestershire sauce,] The sauce may also blend cheese and mustard into a béchamel sauce.
[The Constance Spry Cookery Book by Constance Spry][Fannie Farmer, Boston Cooking-School Cook Book Boston, 1896, ]
Variants
Hannah Glasse, in her 1747
cookbook The Art of Cookery, gives close variants "Scotch rabbit", "Welsh rabbit" and two versions of "English rabbit".
[Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, ...by a Lady (London: L. Wangford, c. 1775), p. 190. [1]]
To make a Scotch rabbit, toast a piece of 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 a slice of 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, and 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, cut your cheese in very thin slices, 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, it makes a buck rabbit
Welsh rarebit blended with tomato (or tomato soup) makes a blushing bunny.[Lily Haxworth Wallace, Rumford Chemical Works, The Rumford complete cookbook, 1908, full text, p. 196]
In France, un Welsh is popular in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais
Name
The first recorded reference to the dish was "Welsh rabbit" in 1725 in an English context, but the origin of the term is unknown. It was probably intended to be jocular.
[ Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition, 2011, s.v. ' Welsh rabbit' and ' Welsh rarebit']
Welsh
"Welsh" was probably used as a pejorative
dysphemism,
[Eric Partridge, Words, Words, Words!, 1939, republished as in 2015, p. 8] meaning "anything substandard or vulgar",
[Kate Burridge, Blooming English: Observations on the Roots, Cultivation and Hybrids of the English Language, , 2004, p. 220] or that "the closest thing to rabbit the Welsh could afford was melted cheese on toast".
[Roy Blount Jr., Alphabet Juice, 2009, , s.v. 'folk etymology'] Or it may simply allude to the "frugal diet of the upland Welsh".
[Meic Stephens, ed., The Oxford companion to the literature of Wales, 1986, s.v., p. 631] Other examples of such jocular food names are
Welsh caviar (
laverbread);
[Ole G. Mouritsen, Seaweeds: Edible, Available, and Sustainable, 2013, , p. 150] Essex lion (calf);
Norfolk capon (kipper);
Irish apricot (potato);
[E.B. Tylor, "The Philology of Slang", Macmillan's Magazine, 29:174:502-513 (April 1874), p. 505] Rocky Mountain oysters (bull testicles); and
Scotch woodcock (scrambled eggs and anchovies on toast).
[Laurence Horn, "Spitten image: Etymythology and Fluid Dynamics", American Speech 79:1:33-58 (Spring 2004), full text]
The dish may have been attributed to the Welsh because they were fond of roasted cheese: "I am a Welshman, I do love cause boby, good roasted cheese." (1542)[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)] "Cause boby" is Welsh caws pobi 'baked cheese', but it is unclear whether this is related to Welsh rabbit.
Rabbit and rarebit
The word
rarebit is a corruption of
rabbit, "Welsh rabbit" being first recorded in 1725, and "rarebit" in 1781.
is not used on its own, except in alluding to the dish.
[ In 1785, Francis Grose defined a "Welch rabbit" sic as "a Welch rare bit", without saying which came first.][Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785, s.v. ' rabbit' and ' Welch rabbit'] Later writers were more explicit: for example, Schele de Vere in 1866 clearly considers "rabbit" to be a corruption of "rarebit".[Maximilian Schele de Vere, "Fated Words", Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 32:188:202-207 (January 1866), p. 205]
Many commentators have mocked the misconstrual of the jocular "rabbit" as the serious "rarebit":
-
Brander Matthews (1892): "few writers are as ignorant and dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tortured the obviously jocular Welsh rabbit into a pedantic and impossible Welsh rarebit..."
[Brander Matthews, Americanisms and Briticisms, 1892, p. 39-40; also in Brander Matthews: "As to 'American Spelling", Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 85:506:277-284, p. 279]
-
Sir John Rhŷs (1901): "It is best known to Englishmen as 'Welsh rabbit', which superior persons 'ruling the roast' in our kitchens choose to make into rarebit: how they would deal with 'Scotch woodcock' and 'Oxford hare,' I do not know."
-
Sivert N. Hagen (1904): " Welsh rabbit... is of jocular origin... Where, however, the word is used by the sophisticated, it is often 'corrected' to Welsh rarebit, as if 'rare bit
[Sivert N. Hagen, "On the Origin of the term Edda", Modern Language Notes 19:5:127-134 (May 1904), p. 132]
-
Ambrose Bierce (1911): "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."
[Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, v. 7, 1911, s.v., p. 274]
-
H. W. Fowler (1926): "Welsh Rabbit is amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong."
[Fowler, H. W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press, 1926]
Welsh rabbit has become a standard savoury listed by culinary authorities including Auguste Escoffier, Louis Saulnier and others; they tend to use rarebit, communicating to a non-English audience that it is not a meat dish.
"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."[Alice Ross, "Hunting The Welch Rabbit", Journal of Antiques and Collectibles, May 2000]
Extended use
Since the 20th century, "rarebit", "rarebit sauce", or even "rabbit sauce" has occasionally been a cheese sauce used on or other dishes.[Gyula Décsy, Hamburger for America and the World, 1984, , p. 31][Dawn Simonds, Best Food in Town: The Restaurant Lover's Guide to Comfort Food in the Midwest, 2004, , pp. 47, 48, 59]["Universal sauces for main courses", Michael Greenwald, Cruising Chef Cookbook, 2000, , p. 280]["From One Hostess to Another", Good Housekeeping, May 1919, p. 44]
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 AD 1526 (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'.[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).]
Betty Crocker 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. It also claims that Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens ate Welsh rarebit at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub in London.
Welsh rarebit supposedly causes vivid dreams. The 1902 book Welsh Rarebit Tales is a collection of short horror stories supposedly from members of a writing club who ate a dinner which included a large portion of rarebit immediately before sleeping in order to give themselves inspiring dreams.[ ] Winsor McCay's comic strip series Dream of the Rarebit Fiend recounts the fantastic dreams that various characters have 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 and exhibit inverse personality traits.
A humorous appendix of anonymous authorship is sometimes added to the end of Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, debating the existence and nature of the 'Welsh Rabbit' as though it were a real animal.
See also
Notes
