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For as long as I can remember, my mother has made a bizarre dish called Welsh Rarebit. Translated to American fare, it involves melted cheese over crumbled saltines and ...um, that's pretty much it. When the family gathers at my brother's Mississippi home for the holidays, my mother is expected to recreate this family memory on the stove.
So, for the fifth year in a row, my mother, Iva Mae, whipped up a batch of this odd little dish and the men in my family went nuts, my eight-year-old nephew being the latest convert. (For reasons I'm hesitant to explain, the dish does not appeal to women.) My Dad gets so excited, we usually have to make additional trips to retrieve extra crackers. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law, MaryAnn, conveniently makes plans - any plans - to be out of the house this night.
First, one crumbles an innocent stack of Premium saltines into a bowl. Next step, gently ladle a giant gob of melted cheese concoction (flour, butter, Velveeta, dry mustard, Tobasco, dried onion, Worcestershire, milk) atop. If feeling racy, one could add a few pickle chips; it's like White Trash Stew.
Sure, I always ate it but was never a big fan. Mom is a great cook and I have many favorites but this wasn't one of them. She was merely giving in to one of my father's boyhood requests. I'd naturally assumed the dish was only strange enough to be found in our house but I was quite wrong.
Apparently, Welsh Rarebit can be traced back to 1725. It was an ironic name coined in the days when the Welsh were notoriously poor. Then, much like now, only the wealthier folks could afford butchered meat. While rabbit was the poor man's meat in England, in Wales, the poor man's meat was cheese. Welsh peasants were not allowed to eat rabbits caught in hunts on the estates of nobility, so melted cheese was the substitute. Somehow, they also mangled the word "rabbit" and "rarebit" came into usage.
As the story goes, my father's mother, Bethel, brought back the recipe from a fancy Chicago restaurant, where she'd had Welsh Rarebit as an appetizer. Somehow, the dish had been elevated into a dainty delicacy. Grandma Bethel duplicated the recipe best she could and served to her family, which included my father, Bob.
When Bob married Iva Mae, he requested the dish and she, in turn, duplicated the Welsh Rarebit recipe best she could. Thus, the Clisbys have restored the dish to its original blue collar status, at least once a year, down here on the Mississippi bayou.
The whole Welsh Rarebit story is perfect illustration of how a local dish born from necessity, traveled the world, climbed up and down the societal ladder and now lives on in (at least) one American family's tradition.
And now, I give you a man (my father) in a full state of cheesey-crunchy JOY:
Happy New Year!
~Heather
BlogHer Section Editor, LIFE & GREEN; Contributing Editor, Animal & Wildlife Concerns; Proprietor, ClizBiz
