Welsh rarebit
Rarebit, Welsh rarebit, or Welsh rabbit (the original name, dating from the 18th century[1]), is traditionally a sauce made from a mixture of cheese and butter, poured over toasted bread which has been buttered. In current popular use, it can be simply slices of cheese placed on toasted bread and melted by heat from above in a grill or salamander (in North America termed a broiler).
Variants include the addition of ale, mustard, and ground cayenne pepper or ground paprika[2][3][4]. The sauce may also be made by blending cheese into a sauce béchamel[5][6] (a Mornay sauce). Such variants have become textbook savoury dishes listed by culinary authorities including Escoffier, Saulnier, Hering and others, who tend to use the form Welsh rarebit, emphasizing that it is not a meat dish.
Evidence suggests that there is more than one way to make a rarebit: the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 has two recipes for 'Welsh Rarebit', one with béchamel, the other with beer,[6] The Constance Spry Cookery Book of 1956 has two recipes for 'Welsh Rabbit', one with flour and one without[7], Le Guide Culinaire of 1907 has two recipes for 'Welsh Rarebit', one with ale and one without[8], and the Oxford English Dictionary of 1928 shows two methods of making 'Welsh Rabbit', one with a sauce including ale and the other with just cheese[1].
In the late 1800s a variation of this was called the "slip on". This dish was to be found at "Old Tom's", a chop house in the Wall Street area of New York City. It was a welsh rabbit "poured over apple or minced pie". (See the New York Times article of Dec 30, 1900.)[citation needed]. Another variation (and some would say a less revolting one) is to use poached fillets of sole in place of the toasted bread, in which case it's called "Sole Mornay"[citation needed]. In another variation, the bread is fried instead of toasted, and in place of the cheese sauce, beef fillet and foie gras are used; in which case it's called "Tournedos Rossini"[citation needed].
Creative application by various chefs has led to the term rarebit being used for a variety of other dishes comprising cheese on toasted bread, a notable example being buck rarebit which has a poached egg added, either on top of or beneath the cheese sauce. Because such variants depend only on the creativity of chefs, the list of names is endless.
An English dish, it is normally made with Cheddar cheese, in contrast to the Continental European fondue which classically depends on Swiss cheeses and of which Welsh rabbit was a local variant.
Origin of the names
The first recorded use of the term Welsh rabbit was in 1725, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but the origin of the term is uncertain.[1] One theory is that 'Welsh rabbit' is an ironic name coined in the days when the Welsh were notoriously poor: only better-off people could afford butcher's meat, and while in England rabbit was the poor man's meat, in Wales the poor man's meat was cheese. Another theory is that the name was an intentional slur on the Welsh, since the dish contains no meat and so was considered inferior. Another theory is that because the word Welsh was at the time used by the English to describe anything inferior or anything foreign, the name alludes to the dish's Continental European origin.
It is also possible that the dish was attributed to Wales because the Welsh 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."[9] In Boorde's account, "cause boby" is the Welsh caws pobi, meaning "roasted cheese". It is the earliest known reference to cheese being eaten cooked in the British Isles but whether it implies a recipe like Welsh rabbit is a matter of speculation.
The term Welsh rarebit was evidently a later corruption of Welsh rabbit, being first recorded in 1785 by Francis Grose, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. 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...."[10]
According to the American satirist Ambrose Bierce, the continued use of rarebit was an attempt to rationalize 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-a-hole is really not a toad, and that riz-de-veau à la financière is not the smile of a calf prepared after the recipe of a she banker."[11]
In his 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."[12]
The word rarebit has no other use than in Welsh rabbit[1] and, regardless of its evidently erroneous origin, "rarebit" alone has come to be used in place of the original name[13], an example of an eggcorn.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was common in England to use the verb 'Welsh' to imply thievery or dishonesty – to 'Welsh' on a deal – or the adjective 'Welsh' to mean inferior quality or an outright counterfeit. In an age where practically everyone knew how to snare a rabbit for the pot, a Welshman was considered to be so lazy and inept that snaring a rabbit for the pot was beyond him[citation needed]. Cheese and bread had to do instead.
References
- ^ a b c d Oxford English Dictionary, volume W, Oxford University Press, 1928, and the Compact (micrographic) edition of 1971
- ^ Le Guide Culinaire by Georges Auguste Escoffier, translated by H L Cracknell and R J Kaufmann
- ^ Le Répertoire de la Cuisine by Louis Saulnier, translated by E Brunet
- ^ Hering's Dictionary of Classical and Modern Cookery, edited and translated by Walter Bickel
- ^ The Constance Spry Cookery Book by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume
- ^ a b Farmer, Fannie M., Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (Boston, 1896) ISBN 0-451-12892-3
- ^ The Constance Spry Cookery Book by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume
- ^ Le Guide Culinaire by Georges Auguste Escoffier, translated by H L Cracknell and R J Kaufmann
- ^ Andrew Boorde: The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, the whyche dothe teache a man to speake parte of all maner of languages, and to know the usage and fashion of all maner of countreys (1542)
- ^ Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, p. 592 at books.google.com (accessed 9 November 2007)
- ^ Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, 1911
- ^ Fowler, H. W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press, 1926
- ^ The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition (2006)