For some reason, this dish tends to fall into the male sphere of gastronomic activities. It could be something to do with a manly partiality for savouries. Something cheesy on toast forms a traditional finale to the meal in gents’ clubs and chophouses. Very nice it is too, if you happen to have sufficient space. Maybe I’m in charge of cheese on toast because I happen to be more intuitively brilliant about the ingredients and their proportions. Maybe it’s because I allow an extra minute or two under the grill so the seething cheese attains dark, speckled perfection. However, it has occurred to me that Mrs H might just have ceded authority so she can stay in bed while I am grating and grilling in the kitchen. This was not the cause of our dispute when I asked Mrs H if she would like some Welsh rabbit.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘But it’s not rabbit. It’s rarebit.’
‘Rarebit is a pointless, annoying bit of eighteenth century gentrification. It just sounds better than rabbit.’
‘Well, what does a rabbit have to do with cheese on toast?’
‘Well, what the hell is a rarebit, anyway?’
‘Nobody calls it Welsh rabbit. Everyone calls it Welsh rarebit.’
‘Well, everyone is wrong.’
The more I consider Mrs H’s explanation for not doing this dish of disputed nomenclature, the more I think it is baloney. After all, Welsh rabbit is scarcely Blumenthalesque in its complexity (though I’m sure Heston could invent an impossibly complicated version if he put his mind to it). My own formula goes along the following lines. Grate up a quantity of mature Cheddar – though, as we shall see, many other cheeses also work well – and put the result in a bowl, add the yolk of an egg, a few splats of Worcestershire sauce, a generous teaspoon of smooth Dijon mustard and stir well. Lightly toast a few slices of good bread, preferably sourdough. Spread the cheese mixture on the toast. Shove under a hot grill until the topping begins a lava-like bubbling and emits a concentrated aroma of cheesy savouriness. Is any culinary smell more alluring? The point to aim for – and this requires constant vigilance – is when the cheesy mix has melted and gained a dark-brown mottling but the toast has not carbonised too radically round its edge.
‘Yum,’ said Mrs H as she munched the combination of cheesiness and ooziness and crunchiness and almost-burntness. ‘When you come down to it, there’s nothing better than Welsh rarebit.’
‘Rabbit.’
‘I’ll do anything for a bit of cheese on toast, as long as it’s not too strenuous.’
Crumbs! No wonder I decided to explore every feasible variation of the dish in order to keep the fire of love burning. Or at least lightly toasted.
There turned out to be no shortage of possibilities. A traditional nibble for rich and poor alike, cheese on toast is the great British snack. The French may have their croque monsieur and the Swiss their raclette, but it was toasted cheese that Ben Gunn lusted for during his three years on Treasure Island. ‘But, mate,’ the castaway informed Jim Hawkins. ‘My heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn’t happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted, mostly.’ Welsh rabbit remains a distinctly British speciality.
A classic formulation appears in Jane Grigson’s book English Food. Compared to my shortcut version, her ‘Welsh rabbit’ (note correct name) is a bit complicated. It involves gently warming grated cheese (she suggests Lancashire, Cheddar or Double Gloucester) in a small pan with milk or beer until it melts into ‘a thick cream’, then adding butter, English mustard and salt and pepper to taste. The result is then heated ‘until it is very hot but below boiling point’. You pour it over two slices of toast in a heatproof serving dish. Grigson warns: ‘The cheese will overflow the edges of the toast.’ The toast is grilled until ‘the cheese bubbles and becomes brown in appetising-looking splashes.’
Though this dish shows distinct signs of being a meal rather than a snack – for aforementioned reasons, the view at Hirst HQ is that Welsh rabbit should be something you can eat with your fingers – it came from an authority of such eminence that I gave it a whirl. I decided to do Cheddar with beer. It was a strange sensation to open a bottle of beer at breakfast time (though I dare say one could get used to it). The resulting slurry, tipped over two slices of sourdough toast in a cast-iron pan, didn’t do much browning under the grill and the toast became distinctly wilty under the cheese mix. The dish also involved a slight singeing of the fingers and quite a bit more washing-up than my version.
But Grigson’s rabbit went down a storm with Mrs H. ‘Mmm. I could eat it all day long.’ Even the wilting toast escaped censure. ‘I quite like the toast soft rather than crunchy. It makes you concentrate on the cheese more.’ Maybe due to the beer or the mature Cheddar, Grigson’s Welsh rabbit had a profound depth of flavour, addictive yet satisfying. ‘Of course, I prefer your eggy version,’ Mrs H added diplomatically, ‘but this is a real treat.’ Milk will probably also work well in the dish. (A friend of mine had a Lancashire grandfather whose favourite meal was grilled cheese with milk. His method was to put milk and bits of cheese on a tin plate, toast it under the grill and mop up the result with bread.)
Keen to keep up the fusillade of cheesy billets d’amour, I tried the version advocated by several professional cooks, which involves making the topping first and allowing it to set. Melt a knob of butter in a saucepan, stir in a small quantity of flour, a pinch of mustard powder, a hint of cayenne and a few splats of Worcestershire sauce, then add a good splash of Guinness and half a pound of good grated cheese. When it’s turned creamy, turn out the cheesy mixture into a container and leave to set in the fridge. This is then spread on toast and grilled. Cheese-on-toast purists may complain that the protracted nature of this style of Welsh rabbit lacks spontaneity. You have to think ahead. However, it is very quick to make when you have the topping in the fridge, which explains its appeal for chefs. Most significantly, its intense flavour transported Mrs H to a transcendental plateau of pleasure. ‘Coo!’
I turned to the subcontinent for my next variation. Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert of the Madras Cavalry was, I’m sorry to say, a rarebit man. In Culinary Jottings for Madras (1885), he observes: ‘For a really good Welsh rarebit, you should have a sound fresh cheese, not over-strong.’ But his other ingredients do not eschew piquancy. You are instructed to mix two ounces grated cheese with one ounce of butter, two egg yolks, a dessertspoon of English mustard, salt, and a pinch of something called ‘Nepaul pepper’ (apparently it was along the lines of cayenne, though not quite as strong) until thoroughly smooth. I used Double Gloucester and substituted a tiny amount of cayenne for the mysterious Nepaul stuff. The bright yellow result is spread on toast that has been buttered on both sides (the Col’s italics) and baked in a buttered pie dish in a really hot oven for ten minutes.
With its brown and gold topping, the result looked tempting. ‘It’s quite mustardy,’ said Mrs H after taking her first nibble. ‘In fact, it’s very mustardy. Phew!’ While not exactly unpalatable, it was an astonishingly robust, take-no-prisoners Victorian snack, somehow both rich and austere. Mrs H quite liked it, but I found the overdose of English mustard slightly queasy-making.
‘The Colonel must have liked his food very hot,’ said Mrs H. ‘It’s OK but I don’t agree with him that it is a really good Welsh rarebit.’
‘Rabbit.’
‘Well, he says rarebit.’
Cheesed off with this bickering, I decided to sort out the moniker once and for all. Jane Grigson said that it has to be ‘rabbits, not rarebits or rare bits, which are both false etymological refinement’. The OED dates Welsh rabbit to 1725, with rarebit appearing sixty years later. In the forthright view of