A Rare Bit for a Bunny

I love cooking for my friends.  And every once in a while, one of them asks me to make something for them.  These rare requests are like gold, because they usually take me into new culinary territory. 

Recently, one of my dearest friends tagged me in a post on Facebook and asked me to learn how to make something because she only gets it once a year, she loves it and she wants to have it more often. 

The picture she sent was of great slabs of bread smothered in cheese sauce and broiled until the tops were golden and bubbly, sprinkled with a bit of parsley for color. 

Welsh rarebit, my friends, is my next culinary adventure. 

Also called Welsh rabbit (but, I would imagine, never by the Bunny), this dish is of questionable origins.  One legend states that the dish was conceived by poor Welsh folk who were not allowed to eat the rabbits from the English hunt, so they came up with this bread and cheese sauce concoction instead. 

Like they couldn’t tell the difference? What a crock!

Per the Wikipedia article, “the first recorded use of the term Welsh rabbit was in 1725, but the origin of the term is unknown.  It may have been an ironic name coined in the days when the Welsh were notoriously poor: only better-off people could afford meat.  In England the poor-man’s meat was rabbit, in Wales the poor man’s meat was cheese.” 

This I might actually buy. 

As I looked at some recipes, a couple of things crossed my mind. 

First, why had I never had this?  It’s cheese sauce and bread!  What’s not to love??

Second, for someone who doesn’t drink beer, this will be one more thing that I will probably love that contains beer. 

Some recipes call for the sauced slices of bread to be broiled, some just tell you to ladle the sauce over pieces of toast and enjoy.  Some call for beer, some don’t.  Some call for a béchamel base, some don’t.

At its heart, though, it is melted cheese stabilized with some flour and butter, thinned with some milk or cream (or beer) and served with bread.  Remind you of anything?

Let’s face it, people.  Welsh rarebit is really lazy man’s fondue. 

What is fondue at its most basic?  Cubes of bread dipped in melty cheese sauce (stabilized with some flour and thinned with beer or wine).  But it’s kind of fussy, isn’t it?  You have to cut up all that bread.  You have to have something to keep the cheese sauce warm so that you can dip your bread into it.  But the Welsh rarebit way, you just put it all on a plate and dig in.  And you don’t have to share a communal pot of cheese with people you may not like.  You get your own plate, your own cheese sauce.  You can even lick the plate if you want to.  Not something I would recommend you do with a fondue pot. 

And now it all makes sense.  Why my friend asked me to learn how to make this dish.  We all know Bunny loves fondue.  So of course she would love Welsh rarebit, too. 

So, dear Bunny, I am looking at recipes to choose one to make for you soon.  We just have to figure out when.  :o)

Because there are few things in this world that make me happier than feeding my friends.