Welsh Rarebit: The Cheese Toast That Insists It Contains No Rabbit

Toast debates · 7 min read

The first fact in the record is a denial. No rabbit has ever been involved. Every serious account of Welsh rarebit opens with some version of that sentence, which tells its own story: this is a cheese toast that has spent roughly three centuries fielding questions about a meat it never contained. The dish is toasted bread under a savoury cheese sauce, seasoned with mustard and usually loosened with ale. The name is the controversy. The sauce, as the hearing below records, has controversies of its own.

The name, on the documented record

Documented first, legend second, in that order. The Oxford English Dictionary position, as reported by Welsh Icons, is that the original name of the food was Welsh rabbit, and that Welsh rarebit appears only as an etymologizing alteration of it, a later respelling by people who did not understand why the dish was called rabbit. There is, the same account notes, no evidence of the independent use of the word rarebit. The dates are specific. The first record of the word was in 1725. The alternative form, rarebit, only occurs from 1785, a full sixty years later. Recipe books of the Victorian era and after then settled on Welsh rarebit, the euphemism, and the euphemism largely won.

The joke underneath the original name is also documented, and it is not kind. In the 17th and 18th centuries the adjective Welsh was commonly used to mean inferior quality, even implying counterfeiting. Rabbit was a meat ordinary people could snare for the pot. Welsh rabbit, on this reading, was an English joke at Welsh expense: cheese melted with beer was the rabbit of a man considered too feckless to catch a real one. A second account of the dish's formal history places it in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in the 18th century, under the Rabbit name, with an earlier toasted cheese form, called caws pobi in Welsh, placed in the 1500s. The Welsh name on record today is caws-wedi-pobi, or in the north, caws ar tôst.

Then there is the legend, labelled as such. A Betty Crocker cookbook claim, repeated by recipe sites, holds that Welsh peasants were denied the rabbits taken on hunts on noble estates and ate melted cheese instead. It is a tidier story than the slur, which is exactly why it travels. The sites repeating it concede that no one really knows quite how the dish got its name. The documented record is less tidy and better evidenced: a mocking nickname from 1725, a polite respelling from 1785, and a dish that outlasted both. Rarebit is not a word for anything else. It exists only to stand in front of this toast and insist, correctly, that the rabbit is not coming.

The sauce, tried on three binders

Strip the name away and a second dispute remains, because the leading recipes build the sauce three different ways and none of them acknowledges the others. The disagreement is about what holds the sauce together, and it changes the cooking.

The baseline melt is the oldest pattern and the least forgiving. Cheese, butter, and ale go into a pan over low heat, the mixture is brought to near boiling point, and that is the entire engineering. It works because it is served at once, poured or spread over toast and browned under a hot grill before it can think about separating. The roux bound version is the professional answer to the same problem: a roux gives the sauce a structure that survives holding and grilling, which is why that version can state flatly that there is no egg in it, the roux does the binding instead. The yolk bound version is the richest and the most delicate, heated very gently and stirred until melted, because yolk rewards low heat and punishes impatience. Its published record is also the sloppiest, since a recipe that cannot state its yield cannot tell a reader what a serving is.

One boundary is not in dispute. A slice of bread topped with a slice of cheese and grilled is cheese on toast, and the record states plainly that it is not a real Welsh rabbit. The sauce is the dish. Cheese choices on record run to hard English and Welsh cheeses: mature Cheddar, including a named Montgomery in the roux version, and Double Gloucester, Cheshire, or Lancashire in the traditional list. Topping the finished rarebit with a poached egg produces the documented named variant, the buck rabbit, which is the closest this dish has ever come to living up to its original name, and it still contains no rabbit.

The standard procedure, as ruled

The procedure below follows the baseline documented recipe, which is the construction a first time cook can execute with the fewest moving parts. The roux and yolk variations are recorded in the table above for cooks who want them.

• 25 g (1 oz) butter
• 375 g (12 oz) mature Welsh farmhouse cheese, or a good mature Cheddar, grated
• 100 ml (4 fl oz) ale or milk
• 1/2 teaspoon mild mustard
• Salt and pepper
• Thick slices of bread, toasted

1. Melt the butter in a pan over low heat. Add the grated cheese and stir over the low heat until melted.
2. Pour in the ale or milk. Add the mustard and any other flavouring being used, and season to taste with salt and pepper.
3. Bring the mixture to near boiling point, then remove it from the heat. Near boiling is the documented instruction; a hard boil is where a cheese sauce of this construction goes to separate.
4. Toast the bread. The toast must be complete before the sauce lands, because the sauce waits for no one.
5. Spread or pour the rarebit over the toast and brown it. Place under a hot grill, or finish as one documented version directs, under a broiler for 2 to 3 minutes until the cheese bubbles and starts to brown.
6. Serve immediately. Rarebit is eaten hot, at the table it was aimed at.

Leftover sauce, on the rare occasion it exists, is a leftover like any other. United States Department of Agriculture guidance is to refrigerate leftovers at 40°F (4°C) or below, never leave food out for more than 2 hours, or 1 hour above 90°F (32°C), and use refrigerated leftovers within 3 to 4 days. A cheese sauce reheats gently or not at all; the grill finish, however, does not survive storage, and a reheated rarebit should be filed as a new, lesser dish.

The verdict: which rarebit to file

For a weeknight, the baseline melt, because it is six ingredients, one pan, and a documented method that has been in print in some form for centuries. For a sauce that must wait, be grilled hard, or feed people who will ask what is in it, the roux bound version, because structure is what a roux is for. For the richest plate and a cook willing to stand over low heat and stir, the yolk bound version, accepting that its published quantities need a yield decision before the cheese is grated. What success looks like is uniform across all three rulings: a sauce that pours as one substance rather than as cheese and liquid travelling separately, a surface blistered and browned in patches under the grill, toast that is still crisp at the edges where the sauce stops, and a plate served hot enough that the denial can be issued with confidence. There is no rabbit. There was never any rabbit. The cheese, properly governed, is enough.

— Rex Bennett, Entertainment Writer