Welsh rarebit makes a quick & easy dinner (2024)

Last Monday I woke up thinking it was Sunday. That’s a terrible way to start a week, and I spent the day engaged in a sort of nonviolent protest against my phone, which chimed with obligations, news alerts and flood warnings. The afternoon came and went and, though I hadn’t amounted to much, dinnertime arrived, as insistent as ever.

On days like this, repertoire recipes can be enormously useful. Faced only with what’s in the refrigerator or pantry, a cook’s brain whirs to life, spinning some possibilities from canned sardines or pasta or bread and cheese. This is not browsing-a-cookbook-and-making-a-shopping-list kind of dinner, this is oh-man-it’s-6 p.m.-everyone-is-hungry-why-didn’t-I-plan kind of dinner. Neither is better or worse; life is made up of both types of meals.

There’s a lot you can do with bread and cheese, but my favorite is Welsh rarebit, or cheese sauce on toast, something I grew up eating. In the first literary reference to the dish (in a text from 1725), which is likely but not positively Welsh in origin, it’s called Welsh rabbit. Some speculate that the name derived from the British tradition of adding “Welsh” before a noun, denoting that it was of lesser quality. Welsh rabbit, then, was not a dish of succulent meat, but cheese on toast, eaten by people who couldn’t afford the former. But at some point rabbit became rarebit, and the new name stuck.

Perhaps you think you don’t need a recipe for cheese sauce on toast, and maybe that’s true. But it’s possible that you need permission to serve it for dinner, without apology, and that’s where I’m here to help. My version is minorly gussied up; I use a bit of beer in the sauce, a nice malty porter if I’ve got it, along with some mustard powder and Worcestershire sauce. I add in a few big handfuls of grated aged white cheddar, nutty and sharp, and thicken the sauce enough that it coats a spoon but can be poured from the pot in a silky ribbon over slices of good toasted bread.

A salad alongside is nice, something crunchy with an acidic vinaigrette to counteract the richness of rarebit, but don’t think too hard about it — this is meant to be an easy dinner. It shouldn’t take you more than about 20 minutes to make and 10 or so to eat, swiping forkfuls of crunchy bread through the pooled sauce on the plate until every bit is gone.

Welsh Rarebit

Serves 4

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons all purpose flour

1 teaspoon dry mustard powder

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

½ cup dark beer, preferably porter

¾ cup whole milk

6 ounces aged cheddar cheese, grated

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

8 slices country bread

Olive oil, for drizzling

Instructions: In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Whisk in the flour and mustard powder and cook, whisking, for 30 seconds. Pour in the Worcestershire sauce and beer and whisk until smooth, then pour in the milk and whisk to combine. Add the cheese bit by bit, whisking until it melts into the sauce. Bring to a simmer, whisking, and simmer until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat.

Preheat the broiler. Arrange the slices of bread on a rimmed baking sheet and drizzle each slice on both sides with olive oil. Set the baking sheet a few inches from the broiler and broil until the bread is toasted on the first side, then flip and broil on the second side until toasted. Arrange 2 slices of bread on each plate. Return the cheese sauce to low heat and whisk until smooth and hot. Spoon a generous amount of cheese sauce over the toasted bread slices and serve immediately.

Leftover cheese sauce can be cooled, then transferred to a lidded container and refrigerated. It can be reheated over low heat and spooned over toast as described above, or you can toast a slice of bread, spread the cold cheese sauce over the toast (it will have the texture of peanut butter when cold) and broil until browned and bubbly. Leftover cheese sauce is also delicious on a baked potato, spooned over cooked broccoli or spread, cold, on crackers.