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Welsh Rarebit

A cheese sauce made with butter, flour, salt, mustard, cheese, paprika, egg, and milk, served over crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Welsh Rarebit

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Warm the butter in a pan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until smooth.

  3. Add the salt, mustard, cheese, and paprika.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg and milk together.

  5. Gradually add the egg mixture to the cheese mixture.

  6. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until thick enough to serve on crackers.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Mustard + cheesetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cheese
Melts into the sauce to provide the main rich flavor and body.
Egg
Adds richness and helps thicken the sauce as it gently cooks.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture into a smooth base.
Milk
Provides the liquid that turns the cheese into a spreadable sauce.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat, stirring constantly. Cheese proteins tighten and can turn grainy or stringy if overheated, and egg can scramble. Gentle, constant stirring keeps the sauce smooth and lets it thicken evenly.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cheese, egg, milk):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cheese, egg, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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