Welsh rarebit

Welsh rarebit or Welsh rabbit (/ˈrɛərbɪt/ or /ˈræbɪt/) is a dish of hot cheese sauce, often including ale, mustard, or Worcestershire sauce, served on toasted bread. The origins of the name are unknown, though the earliest recorded use is 1725 as "Welsh rabbit", a jocular name as the dish contains no rabbit; the earliest documented use of "Welsh rarebit" is in 1781. Variants include English rabbit, Scotch rabbit, buck rabbit, golden buck, and blushing bunny.

Though there is no strong evidence that the dish originated in Welsh cuisine, it is sometimes identified with the Welsh caws pobi 'baked cheese', documented in the 1500s.

Some recipes simply melt grated cheese on toast, making it identical to cheese on toast. Others make the sauce of cheese, ale, and mustard, and garnished with cayenne pepper or paprika. Other recipes add wine or Worcestershire sauce. The sauce may also blend cheese and mustard into a béchamel sauce.

Hannah Glasse, in her 1747 cookbook The Art of Cookery, gives close variants "Scotch rabbit", "Welsh rabbit" and two versions of "English rabbit".

Served with an egg on top, it makes a buck rabbit or a golden buck.

Welsh rarebit blended with tomato (or tomato soup) makes a blushing bunny.

In France, un Welsh is popular in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Côte d'Opale regions.

The first recorded reference to the dish was "Welsh rabbit" in 1725 in an English context, but the origin of the term is unknown. It was probably intended to be jocular.

"Welsh" was probably used as a pejorative dysphemism, meaning "anything substandard or vulgar", and suggesting that "only people as poor and stupid as the Welsh would eat cheese and call it rabbit", or that "the closest thing to rabbit the Welsh could afford was melted cheese on toast". Or it may simply allude to the "frugal diet of the upland Welsh". Other examples of such jocular food names are Welsh caviar (laverbread); Essex lion (calf); Norfolk capon (kipper); Irish apricot (potato); Rocky Mountain oysters (bull testicles); and Scotch woodcock (scrambled eggs and anchovies on toast).

The dish may have been attributed to the Welsh because they were fond of roasted cheese: "I am a Welshman, I do love cause boby, good roasted cheese." (1542) "Cause boby" is Welsh caws pobi 'baked cheese', but it is unclear whether this is related to Welsh rabbit.

The word rarebit is a corruption of rabbit, "Welsh rabbit" being first recorded in 1725, and "rarebit" in 1781. Rarebit is not used on its own, except in alluding to the dish. In 1785, Francis Grose defined a "Welch rabbit" [sic] as "a Welch rare bit", without saying which came first. Later writers were more explicit: for example, Schele de Vere in 1866 clearly considers "rabbit" to be a corruption of "rarebit".

Many commentators have mocked the misconstrual of the jocular "rabbit" as the serious "rarebit":

• Brander Matthews (1892): "few [writers] are as ignorant and dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tortured the obviously jocular Welsh rabbit into a pedantic and impossible Welsh rarebit..."
• Sir John Rhŷs (1901): "It is best known to Englishmen as 'Welsh rabbit', which superior persons 'ruling the roast' in our kitchens choose to make into rarebit: how they would deal with 'Scotch woodcock' and 'Oxford hare,' I do not know."
• Sivert N. Hagen (1904): "Welsh rabbit... is of jocular origin... Where, however, the word is used by the sophisticated, it is often 'corrected' to Welsh rarebit, as if 'rare bit'"
• Ambrose Bierce (1911): "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."
• H. W. Fowler (1926): "Welsh Rabbit is amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong."

Welsh rabbit has become a standard savoury listed by culinary authorities including Auguste Escoffier, Louis Saulnier and others; they tend to use rarebit, communicating to a non-English audience that it is not a meat dish.

"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."

Since the 20th century, "rarebit", "rarebit sauce", or even "rabbit sauce" has occasionally been a cheese sauce used on hamburgers or other dishes.

The notion that toasted cheese was a favourite dish irresistible to the Welsh has existed since the Middle Ages. In A C Merie Talys (100 Merry Tales), a printed book of jokes of AD 1526 (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'.

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. It also claims that Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens ate Welsh rarebit at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub in London. It gives no evidence for any of this; indeed, Ben Jonson died almost a century before the term Welsh rabbit is first attested.

Welsh rarebit supposedly causes vivid dreams. The 1902 book Welsh Rarebit Tales is a collection of short horror stories supposedly from members of a writing club who ate a dinner which included a large portion of rarebit immediately before sleeping in order to give themselves inspiring dreams. Winsor McCay's comic strip series Dream of the Rarebit Fiend recounts the fantastic dreams that various characters have 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 and exhibit inverse personality traits.

A humorous appendix of anonymous authorship is sometimes added to the end of Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, debating the existence and nature of the 'Welsh Rabbit' as though it were a real animal.