Welsh rarebit - wikipedia Welsh rarebit For the radio variety show, see Welsh Rarebit ( radio programme ). Welsh rarebit Alternative names Welsh rabbit ( original name ) Type Savoury Variations Buck Rabbit, Blushing Bunny, Hot Brown Cookbook : Welsh rarebit Media : Welsh rarebit Welsh rarebit ( spelling based on folk etymology ) or Welsh rabbit ( original spelling ) is a dish made with 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 the hot cheese sauce may be served in a chafing dish like a fondue, accompanied by sliced, toasted bread. The names of the dish originate from 18th - century Britain. Despite the name, the dish contains no rabbit meat. Contents 1 Sauce 2 Variants 3 Origin 3.1 Welsh 3.2 Rarebit 4 In culture 5 See also 6 References Sauce Recipes for Welsh rarebit include the addition of ale, mustard, ground cayenne pepper or ground paprika and Worcestershire sauce. The sauce may also be made by blending cheese and mustard into a Béchamel sauce. Some recipes for Welsh rarebit have become textbook savoury dishes listed by culinary authorities including Auguste Escoffier, Louis Saulnier and others, who tend to use the form Welsh rarebit, emphasizing that it is not a meat dish. Acknowledging that there is more than one way to make a rarebit, some cookbooks have included two recipes : the Boston Cooking - School Cook Book of 1896 provides one béchamel - based recipe and another with beer, Le Guide Culinaire of 1907 has one with ale and one without, and the Constance Spry Cookery Book of 1956 has one with flour and one without. Variants Hannah Glasse, in her 1747 cookbook The Art of Cookery, gives recipes for `` Scotch rabbit '', `` Welch rabbit '' and two versions of `` English rabbit ''. 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 away 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, a Welsh rarebit is known as a buck rabbit or a golden buck. Welsh rarebit blended with tomato ( or tomato soup ) is known as Blushing Bunny. Origin The first recorded reference to the dish was `` Welsh rabbit '' in 1725, but the origin of the term is unknown. There is some suggestion that Welsh Rabbit 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. 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 ). 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 ), 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 `` 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. `` 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. '' Michael Quinion writes : `` Welsh rabbit is basically cheese on toast ( the word is not ' rarebit ' by the way, that 's the result of false etymology ; ' rabbit ' is here being used in the same way as ' turtle ' in ' mock - turtle soup ', which has never been near a turtle, or ' duck ' in ' Bombay duck ', which was actually a dried fish called bummalo ) ''. 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. '' In culture The notion that toasted cheese was a favourite dish irresistible to the Welsh has existed since the Middle Ages. In AC 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 '. 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. 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 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. '' 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, 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. ( Nancy Enterprises, 1969 ) In the film Phantom Thread ( Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017 ), Reynolds Woodcock orders a Welsh rarebit for breakfast with a poached egg, bacon, scones, jam ( not strawberry ), and sausages. See also Look up Welsh rarebit, Welsh rabbit, or rarebit in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. United Kingdom portal Food portal Dream of the Rarebit Fiend Gomer, the Welsh Rarebit Fiend Beer soup Cheese on toast Cheese roll Croque - monsieur and croque - madame Dagwood sandwich Grilled cheese sandwich Horseshoe sandwich Hot Brown Jiggs dinner List of cheese dishes Mollete Monte Cristo sandwich List of Sandwiches References Jump up ^ `` Welsh Rabbit - Definition of Welsh rabbit by Merriam - Webster ''. Jump up ^ `` Welsh rarebit - definition of Welsh rarebit in English from the Oxford dictionary ''. Jump up ^ Chris Roberts, Heavy Words Lightly Thrown : The Reason Behind Rhyme, Thorndike Press, 2006, ISBN 0 - 7862 - 8517 - 6 ^ Jump up to : The Constance Spry Cookery Book by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume ^ Jump up to : Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989. ^ Jump up to : Le Guide Culinaire by Georges Auguste Escoffier, translated by H.L. Cracknell and R.J. Kaufmann Jump up ^ Le Répertoire de la Cuisine by Louis Saulnier, translated by E. Brunet. Jump up ^ Hering 's Dictionary of Classical and Modern Cookery, edited and translated by Walter Bickel Jump up ^ Recipes published on the labels of Lea and Perrins ( Heinz ) Worcestershire sauce, Jump up ^ `` IT TAKES MORE THAN BEER TO MAKE A PERFECT RAREBIT ''. ^ Jump up to : Farmer, Fannie M., Boston Cooking - School Cook Book Boston, 1896, ISBN 0 - 451 - 12892 - 3 Jump up ^ 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 Jump up ^ `` Definition of `` buck rabbit '' - Collins English Dictionary ``. Jump up ^ `` Golden Buck - Definition of Golden buck by Merriam - Webster ''. Jump up ^ Lily Haxworth Wallace, Rumford Chemical Works, The Rumford complete cookbook, 1908, full text, p. 196 Jump up ^ Stephens, M, 1986. Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, OUP Jump up ^ Written recollections of the artist John Selway, 2013 Jump up ^ `` Online Etymology Dictionary ''. Jump up ^ 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 ) Jump up ^ The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition ( 2006 ) Jump up ^ `` Hunting The Welch Rabbit, Hearth to Hearth Article, JOA&C May 2000 Issue ''. Jump up ^ Michael Quinion, World Wide Words http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/welsh.htm Jump up ^ Merriam - Webster 's Dictionary of English Usage, p. 592 at books.google.com ( accessed 9 November 2007 ) Jump up ^ Fowler, H.W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press, 1926 Jump up ^ 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 ). Jump up ^ Betty Crocker 's Cookbook. Prentice Hall. 1989. p. 184. Jump up ^ Devil 's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, 1911 Cheese dishes Dishes Aligot Almogrote Arizona cheese crisp Bagel and cream cheese Barfi Beer cheese Bryndzové halušky Calzone Carbonara Cauliflower cheese Cervelle de canut Cheese and crackers Cheese bun Cheese fries Cheese on toast Cheese pudding Cheese puffs Cheese roll Cheese slaw Cheese spread Cheesecake Cheetos Chèvre chaud Chhena gaja Chhena jalebi Chhena kheeri Chhena poda Chile con queso Curd snack Fondue Frico Fried cheese Frito pie Gougère Gratin Gujia Gulab jamun Hauskyjza Insalata Caprese Jalapeño popper Kaasstengels Kasseropita Khachapuri Khira sagara Lasagne Lazy varenyky Liptauer Macaroni and cheese Malakoff Mattar paneer Moretum Mornay sauce Mozzarella sticks Mote de queso Nachos Obatzda Ostkaka Parmigiana Paskha Pastizz Peda Pepperoni roll Pimento cheese Pizza Poulet au fromage Poutine Provoleta Quarkkäulchen Quesadilla Quesito Queso flameado Raclette Ras malai Rasabali Rasgulla Saganaki Sandesh Shahi paneer Smažený sýr Spanakopita Stromboli Stuffed peppers Supplì Syrniki Tirokafteri Tiropita Túró Rudi Túrós csusza Urnebes Vatrushka Welsh rarebit Sandwiches Bacon, egg and cheese sandwich Breakfast sandwich Carrozza Cheese dog Cheese dream Cheese sandwich Cheese and pickle sandwich Cheeseburger Cheesesteak Croissan'Wich Croque - monsieur Cuban sandwich Dagwood sandwich Grilled cheese Ham and cheese sandwich Jucy / Juicy Lucy McMuffin Monte Cristo sandwich Patty melt Reuben sandwich Sub sandwich List articles List of cheese dishes List of cheese soups English cuisine Roman times Dishes Sausages Middle Ages Exemplars Utilis Coquinario The Forme of Cury ( c. 1390 ) Dishes Apple pie Bacon Banbury cake Cheesecake Custard Game pie Gingerbread Kippers Mince pie Mortis Pasty Pease pudding Pie Pottage 16th century Exemplars Thomas Dawson ( The Good Huswifes Jewell, 1585 ) Dishes Black pudding Fruit fool Pancake Scones Syllabub Trifle ( without jelly ) 17th century Exemplars Elinor Fettiplace ( Receipt Book, 1604 ) Gervase Markham ( The English Huswife, 1615 ) Robert May ( The Accomplisht Cook, 1660 ) Hannah Woolley ( The Queen - like Closet or Rich Cabinet 1670 ) Kenelm Digby ( The Closet Opened 1699 ) Dishes Battalia pie Currant bun Queen of Puddings Sponge cake Sussex pond pudding Sweet and sour Tea 18th century Exemplars Mary Kettilby ( A Collection of above Three Hundred Receipts 1714 ) John Nott ( The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary, 1723 ) Eliza Smith ( The Compleat Housewife 1727 ) Hannah Glasse ( The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy 1747 ) Elizabeth Raffald ( The Experienced English Housekeeper 1769 ) Richard Briggs ( The English Art of Cookery 1788 ) William Augustus Henderson ( The Housekeeper 's Instructor 1791 ) Dishes Bread and butter pudding Christmas pudding Chutney Cottage or Shepherd 's pie Eccles cake Jellied eels Jugged hare Ketchup Marmalade Parkin Piccalilli Pork pie Roast beef Sandwich Scouse Suet pudding Toad in the hole Trifle ( with jelly ) Welsh rabbit Yorkshire pudding 19th century Exemplars Mrs Rundell ( A New System of Domestic Cookery 1806 ) Eliza Acton ( Modern Cookery for Private Families 1845 ) Charles Elmé Francatelli ( The Modern Cook 1846 ) Isabella Beeton ( Mrs Beeton 's Book of Household Management 1861 ) Dishes Bubble and squeak Cauliflower cheese Cobbler Devilled kidneys Faggots Fish and chips Full English breakfast HP Sauce Ice cream cone Lancashire hotpot Potted shrimps Sausage roll Steak and kidney pudding Battenberg cake Eton mess Eve 's pudding Jam roly - poly Lardy cake Madeira cake Summer pudding Worcestershire sauce 20th century Exemplars Elizabeth David ( A Book of Mediterranean Food 1950 ) Constance Spry Marguerite Patten Jane Grigson Delia Smith Rick Stein Nigel Slater Keith Floyd Marco Pierre White Fergus Henderson Gordon Ramsay Gary Rhodes Dishes Bakewell tart Beef Wellington Carrot cake Chicken tikka masala Crumble Knickerbocker glory Ploughman 's lunch Salad cream 21st century Exemplars Michel Roux Jr. ( Le Gavroche ) Hugh Fearnley - Whittingstall ( River Cottage ) Antony Worrall Thompson Heston Blumenthal ( The Fat Duck ) Mary Berry Clarissa Dickson Wright ( A History of English Food 2011 ) Related Food in England ( 1954 ) List of English dishes List of English cheeses List of puddings Rationing in the United Kingdom Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Welsh_rarebit&oldid=864722735 '' Categories : British cuisine British snack foods Cheese dishes Bread dishes Hidden categories : Use British English from August 2011 Use dmy dates from August 2011 Articles containing Welsh - language text All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from October 2018 Talk Variants Contents About Wikipedia Wikibooks Čeština Cymraeg Deutsch Español Français 한국어 Italiano 日本 語 Português Svenska ไทย 中文 5 more Edit links This page was last edited on 19 October 2018, at 01 : 19 ( UTC ). 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Question: what is the main ingredient in welsh rarebit
Answer: rabbit