Welsh Rarebit

As tradition built it

Serves 4. 15 minutes, plus cooling; about 5 minutes under the grill.

Ingredients

• 15g butter
• 2 tsp plain flour
• 1 tsp English mustard powder
• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper
• a good glug, plus extra to serve Worcestershire sauce
• 150ml Welsh beer
• optional a pinch of sugar
• 300g cheese, ideally half Caerphilly and half cheddar
• 4 thick slices good white sandwich bread

To serve

• optional mustard-dressed leaves, a fried egg, or chutney

Method

1. Melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour and cook them together a couple of minutes.
2. Stir in the mustard powder, cayenne and Worcestershire sauce, then the beer and the sugar if using. Cook out the flour a couple of minutes, stirring.
3. Lower the heat and add the cheese a handful at a time, letting each melt before the next.
4. Leave the mixture to cool. It can be made ahead and kept in the fridge.
5. Heat the grill to high. Toast the bread on both sides, and spread the mixture over the four slices.
6. Grill until molten and bubbling. Score the top with a knife and douse it with more Worcestershire.
7. Serve with a mustard-dressed salad, a fried egg if you like, or chutney as a cheese course.

Notes

The Welsh name for baked cheese, caws pobi, is genuinely old, attested from the 1500s, a 1542 quotation describes a Welshman's fondness for "cause boby, good roasted cheese." The English name is a different matter: "Welsh rabbit" is first recorded only in 1725, and the "rarebit" spelling, widely believed a later gentrification of "rabbit," follows by 1781, with "Welsh" most plausibly functioning as an English joke, the closest thing to rabbit a poor Welshman could supposedly afford, rather than as a genuine claim of Welsh invention.

Hannah Glasse's 1747 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy gives the first printed recipe, alongside parallel "Scotch rabbit" and "English rabbit" versions in the same book.

The recipe is Alex Vines's, of Ogof in Cardiff, for the Welsh Government's Wales.com. Welsh Food & Drink stirs 225g of cheese with butter, Worcestershire, mustard, flour and pepper and just enough beer, Guinness or milk to moisten, to a paste over a gentle heat, and spreads it on bread toasted on one side only.

What a modern chef changes

A rested sauce, torched rather than grilled, on toasted bara brith

Rung 5

Method

1. Age the cheese sauce itself for a day in the fridge before use, letting its flavour deepen and its texture firm slightly.
2. Torch the finished rarebit rather than grilling it, for an even, controlled char without the risk of the sauce splitting under a domestic grill's uneven heat.
3. Make the toast from a slice of the bara brith recipe above, dried and re-toasted rather than fresh bread, for a faint sweetness and spice against the sharp, savoury sauce.
4. Finish with a few drops of a reduced ale gastrique rather than a plain dash of Worcestershire, sharpening the traditional flavour without changing what it is.