Skip to main content
Main

Welsh Rarebit

A cheese sauce served over buttered toast, baked briefly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Make the cheese sauce

  1. Chop the cheese and place it in a saucepan with the butter.

  2. As the butter melts, mash the cheese and butter together until softened.

  3. Add the egg yolks, ale, cayenne pepper, and salt, stirring until creamy without boiling.

Serve

  1. Place the buttered toast on a dish and pour the cheese mixture over it.

  2. Set the dish in the oven for about 2 minutes before serving.

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. 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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Cheese + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooking cheese
Melts into a smooth, rich sauce that forms the body of the dish.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness as they set gently with the cheese.
Ale
Thins the cheese mixture and adds a malty, slightly bitter flavour.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the cheese sauce smooth and glossy.

The step that matters

Stirring without boiling. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot, so the sauce must be stirred gently over low heat until creamy. Boiling curdles the eggs and makes the sauce 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

Macaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesCheese MakingCheese Making50 recipesCheese FrittersCheese Fritters34 recipesCheese OmeletteCheese Omelette31 recipes