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Welsh Rarebit and Golden Bush

A cheese sauce made from grated cheese, milk, egg, mustard, and butter, served over buttered toast and topped with a poached egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 and Golden Bush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine grated cheese, milk, beaten egg, mustard, and butter.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until melted and smooth.

  3. Stir in the crushed soda cracker.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over slices of buttered toast.

  2. Top with a poached egg and serve immediately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Cheese + buttertop 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. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 recipes

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

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 give it its rich, savoury body.
Egg
Thickens the sauce as it heats, helping it set into a smooth, creamy texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cheese melts into, keeping the sauce smooth.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the sauce a silky mouthfeel and rich flavour.
Soda cracker
Adds starch that helps thicken the sauce and stabilise its texture.

The step that matters

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly. Egg proteins set when heated, so high heat or stopping the stirring can curdle the sauce into lumps. Gentle, constant stirring keeps the cheese emulsified and the sauce smooth.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, milk, egg, butter. 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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