Welsh Rarebit - aka Welsh Rabbit!

The Oxford English Dictionary states that Welsh Rarebit can be "simply, slices of toasted cheese laid on toast".

Some people put slices of cheese onto bread, perhaps add some Worcester sauce, then put the whole thing under the grill (broiler) and refer to the result as Welsh Rarebit.

Cheese on toast and Welsh Rarebit (Rabbit) aren't really quite the same thing though...although they do have some ingredients in common. The difference is in the preparation of each dish.

"Proper" Welsh Rarebit does involve toasted bread and cheese and sometimes even Worcester Sauce, but the similarity ends there.

In traditional Welsh Rarebit, a sauce is made from cheese combined with beer (or milk), flour and mustard powder and the resulting hot liquid is poured over the bread prior to grilling (broiling).

Cheese On Toast and Welsh Rarebit are really two different dishes...both are delicious though!

Welsh Rarebit

Serves 2 - 4 people depending on how hungry they are!

Ingredients:

50g/2oz flour

50g/2oz butter or margarine

200ml/8fl.oz beer or milk (NB as regards beer, don't use lager! Ale is best e.g. brown ale, stout such as Guinness etc)

200g/8oz grated, strong, hard cheese e.g. Cheddar, Cheshire, Double Gloucester, Lancashire or Red Leicester

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

2 level teaspoons dry mustard

pepper to taste (or use a little paprika if you want to zazz things up!)

4 slices of bread toasted on one side only

Method:

1) Melt the butter or margarine in a pan, add the flour and mix well to make a roux. Cook for approx 2 minutes, stirring all the time to prevent the roux from burning.

2) Slowly add the beer stirring constantly.

3) Remove from the heat and add the cheese, mustard, Worcestershire sauce and seasoning. Return to the heat and stir constantly until all the cheese has melted.

4) Pour the cheese mixture over the toast and heat on a rack under a hot grill (broiler) until the cheese starts to brown.

Serve Welsh Rarebit on it's own or with salad.

Basic Welsh Rarebit with some interesting additions for the more adventurous!;

Buck Rarebit - topped with a poached egg

Irish Rarebit - topped with onions, vinegar, herbs, and gherkins

Yorkshire Rarebit - topped with bacon and a poached egg

American Rarebit - topped with whisked egg whites

English Rarebit - the same as basic Welsh Rarebit but substitute red wine for beer!

King Rarebit - topped with a fried egg

I was brought up in the Home Counties (south-east of England) and I personally say "Rare-bit"...however my mother was from Wales and she always said "Rabbit"!

It's a matter of personal preference and I think there's no right or wrong! Whether you say rare-bit or rabbit, everyone knows you're referring to some kind of cheese/toast dish, so why worry!

Here's what some others think about this frequently contentious issue;

"Where Delia leaves the mark of her whisk, so amateur chefs and foodies end up in a froth. Now the culinary goddess of Middle England has entered the age-old debate on whether Welsh rarebit versus Welsh rabbit is the correct term for glorified cheese on toast.

In Delia Smith: How To Cook Book Two, she defies tradition by referring to Welsh Rabbit with Sage and Onions. "Rarebit or rabbit?" she says. "I like the latter, which (so the story goes) is what the hunter had for his supper when the rabbits had escaped his gun."

The woman whose mere mention of an ingredient sends store managers into a frenzy, joins the eminent grammarian H W Fowler, whose views on the matter were forthright."Welsh Rabbit," said Fowler, "is amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong."

But Delia's version is likely to be hotly disputed. Mared Sutherland, the assistant curator of domestic life at the Museum of Welsh Life, said it was a never-ending debate. "It's so difficult to know what was the original used, so we can't really be definite," she said. The museum says the name "remains a mystery".

Type "Welsh rarebit" into the internet and find no fewer than 947 references. "Welsh rabbit" gleans some 3,444. Each side fiercely disputes the correctness of the other.

Nearly all agree that the dish is basically derived from cheese, flour and eggs. "I think (it) was part of Welsh fare much too early on and the term rabbit too commonplace throughout Britain to give credence to the popular tradition that the dish was meant to replace the rabbits English landlords forbade their Welsh tenants to catch," says Bobby Freeman, author of First Catch Your Peacock, a book of Welsh food.

Freeman says it was originally described as "Welsh rabbit" and converted at the end of the 18th century into "rarebit".

The internet "word-detective" disagrees. "Welsh Rabbit," otherwise known as melted cheese on toast, (was) invented by commoners in a time when real rabbit was a delicacy reserved for the wealthy," it says. The only thing about the dish that prompts more argument is what should go in it.

"Origin of the names
The first recorded use of the term Welsh rabbit was in 1725, but the origin of the term is unknown. It may be 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.

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." 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.

Rarebit
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...."

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
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 rabbit 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 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 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."

Rum Tum Tiddy is a variation of Welsh Rarebit.

Rum Tum Tiddy Recipe

Serves 2 to 4 people

25g/1oz butter or margarine
1 small chopped onion
1/2 chopped green pepper
1 can condensed tomato soup
150ml/6 fl oz milk
200g/8oz grated (shredded) Cheddar cheese (or use any of the cheeses recommended for Welsh Rarebit as above)
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 egg
50g/2fl.oz sherry
4 slices of toasted bread

Method

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the onion and green pepper and cook till soft

2 . Remove from heat and mix in the tomato soup, milk, cheese and Worcestershire sauce.

3. Return the pan to the heat and cook, stirring constantly, until the cheese has melted

4. Remove the pan from the heat. In a bowl beat the egg and mix in half of the cheese sauce.

5. Pour the egg mixture back into the remainder of the cheese sauce in the saucepan, mix together and heat over a moderate heat for 2 to 3 minutes.

6. Remove from the heat, add the sherry, mix well and spoon over the toast.

Rum Tum Tiddy is also known as Rink-Tum-Tiddy and Ring Tum Ditty!
More info about Rum Tum Tuddy at Cook's Corner - Rink-Tum-Tiddy