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Welsh Rarebit

A cheese sauce served hot over toast or crackers.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cheese

  1. Grate the cheese or cut it into very small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, make a white sauce by combining milk, flour, butter, mustard, cayenne, and salt.

Melt and serve

  1. Add the cheese and stir until it melts, keeping the mixture below the boiling point.

  2. Serve hot over toast or 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. Milk + buttertop 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. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

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

Cheese
Melts into the sauce to give Welsh rarebit its rich, savoury body and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the milk and butter into a white sauce that holds the melted cheese.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and helps form the smooth base with the flour.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the white sauce, giving it a smooth, pourable texture.

The step that matters

Add the cheese and stir until it melts, keeping the mixture below the boiling point.. Cheese proteins toughen and the fat separates when it gets too hot, leaving a grainy, oily sauce. Melting gently keeps it smooth and creamy.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

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