Skip to main content
Main

Welsh Rarebit

A cheese sauce with milk and eggs, flavored with red pepper or mustard, served on crackers or toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cheese and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,130 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Welsh Rarebit

Oven, in the book's wordsA steady oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, heat the milk.

  2. Add the cheese and stir until fully dissolved.

  3. Incorporate the eggs and a little red pepper or mustard.

  4. Cook until the mixture is smooth.

Serve

  1. Serve on cornmeal crackers or toasted bread.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sliced cheese
Melts into the sauce, giving it body, richness and its main savoury flavour.
Milk
Provides the liquid that lets the cheese melt smoothly into a pourable sauce.
Eggs
Thicken the sauce as their proteins set, giving it a smooth, custard-like texture.

The step that matters

Incorporate the eggs over gentle heat. Egg proteins set at fairly low temperatures. Over the gentle heat of a double boiler they thicken the sauce smoothly, while high heat would scramble them and make the mixture grainy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More welsh rarebit recipes

Tomato 3 See all 354 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes