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Welsh Rarebit

A cheese sauce made with butter, milk, egg yolks, and spices, served hot over crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the grated cheese and stir until melted.

  3. Slowly add the milk while stirring constantly.

  4. In a separate bowl, mix the egg yolks with salt and cayenne pepper, then add to the cheese mixture.

  5. Continue stirring until the mixture is smooth.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately 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. 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

Cheese
Melts into the sauce to give it body and its characteristic rich flavor.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness and smoothness as they set gently with heat.
Milk
Loosens the melted cheese into a pourable sauce with a creamy texture.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth texture and rich flavor in the melted base.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks can scramble if they meet very hot cheese directly. Mixing them with a little of the warm mixture first and stirring constantly keeps the sauce smooth and thickened.

“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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