Читать книгу Love Bites: Marital Skirmishes in the Kitchen - Christopher Hirst - Страница 10

‘IT’S MY IDEA OF HEAVEN.’ Mrs H’s rapturous reception of my cheese on toast could prompt a new direction for theology, though I must admit that my productions in this department are occasionally satanically singed. ‘I can’t make it at all,’ she admits. ‘I know it involves Worcestershire sauce and there’s a lot of washing-up after wards, but I don’t know your secret method on account of lolling in bed like Lady Muck while you make it.’

Where better to eat toast covered by a blanket of molten cheese than when one is covered by a duvet? It is one of those rare situations where dish mirrors diner. (I can’t think of many others. You rarely eat soup in the swimming pool.) I don’t want to give the idea that our decadent indulgence of cheese on toast in bed is a frequent occurrence. We only eat it on Sunday mornings and then maybe once a month. Moreover, this sybaritic breakfast is not without drawbacks. Toast crumbs can be a problem. ‘But I’m a very neat eater,’ insists Mrs H. ‘I have to make the bed afterwards to de-crumb your half.’ It is also a very rich dish. You can only take a certain amount on board. I once held a dinner party consisting solely of different kinds of cheese on toast. Everyone turned greenish around the fourth course.

For some reason, this dish tends to fall into the male sphere of gastronomic activities. It could be something to do with a manly partiality for savouries. Something cheesy on toast forms a traditional finale to the meal in gents’ clubs and chophouses. Very nice it is too, if you happen to have sufficient space. Maybe I’m in charge of cheese on toast because I happen to be more intuitively brilliant about the ingredients and their proportions. Maybe it’s because I allow an extra minute or two under the grill so the seething cheese attains dark, speckled perfection. However, it has occurred to me that Mrs H might just have ceded authority so she can stay in bed while I am grating and grilling in the kitchen. This was not the cause of our dispute when I asked Mrs H if she would like some Welsh rabbit.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘But it’s not rabbit. It’s rarebit.’

‘Rarebit is a pointless, annoying bit of eighteenth century gentrification. It just sounds better than rabbit.’

‘Well, what does a rabbit have to do with cheese on toast?’

‘Well, what the hell is a rarebit, anyway?’

‘Nobody calls it Welsh rabbit. Everyone calls it Welsh rarebit.’

‘Well, everyone is wrong.’

The more I consider Mrs H’s explanation for not doing this dish of disputed nomenclature, the more I think it is baloney. After all, Welsh rabbit is scarcely Blumenthalesque in its complexity (though I’m sure Heston could invent an impossibly complicated version if he put his mind to it). My own formula goes along the following lines. Grate up a quantity of mature Cheddar – though, as we shall see, many other cheeses also work well – and put the result in a bowl, add the yolk of an egg, a few splats of Worcestershire sauce, a generous teaspoon of smooth Dijon mustard and stir well. Lightly toast a few slices of good bread, preferably sourdough. Spread the cheese mixture on the toast. Shove under a hot grill until the topping begins a lava-like bubbling and emits a concentrated aroma of cheesy savouriness. Is any culinary smell more alluring? The point to aim for – and this requires constant vigilance – is when the cheesy mix has melted and gained a dark-brown mottling but the toast has not carbonised too radically round its edge.

‘Yum,’ said Mrs H as she munched the combination of cheesiness and ooziness and crunchiness and almost-burntness. ‘When you come down to it, there’s nothing better than Welsh rarebit.’

‘Rabbit.’

‘I’ll do anything for a bit of cheese on toast, as long as it’s not too strenuous.’

Crumbs! No wonder I decided to explore every feasible variation of the dish in order to keep the fire of love burning. Or at least lightly toasted.

There turned out to be no shortage of possibilities. A traditional nibble for rich and poor alike, cheese on toast is the great British snack. The French may have their croque monsieur and the Swiss their raclette, but it was toasted cheese that Ben Gunn lusted for during his three years on Treasure Island. ‘But, mate,’ the castaway informed Jim Hawkins. ‘My heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn’t happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted, mostly.’ Welsh rabbit remains a distinctly British speciality.

A classic formulation appears in Jane Grigson’s book English Food. Compared to my shortcut version, her ‘Welsh rabbit’ (note correct name) is a bit complicated. It involves gently warming grated cheese (she suggests Lancashire, Cheddar or Double Gloucester) in a small pan with milk or beer until it melts into ‘a thick cream’, then adding butter, English mustard and salt and pepper to taste. The result is then heated ‘until it is very hot but below boiling point’. You pour it over two slices of toast in a heatproof serving dish. Grigson warns: ‘The cheese will overflow the edges of the toast.’ The toast is grilled until ‘the cheese bubbles and becomes brown in appetising-looking splashes.’

Though this dish shows distinct signs of being a meal rather than a snack – for aforementioned reasons, the view at Hirst HQ is that Welsh rabbit should be something you can eat with your fingers – it came from an authority of such eminence that I gave it a whirl. I decided to do Cheddar with beer. It was a strange sensation to open a bottle of beer at breakfast time (though I dare say one could get used to it). The resulting slurry, tipped over two slices of sourdough toast in a cast-iron pan, didn’t do much browning under the grill and the toast became distinctly wilty under the cheese mix. The dish also involved a slight singeing of the fingers and quite a bit more washing-up than my version.

But Grigson’s rabbit went down a storm with Mrs H. ‘Mmm. I could eat it all day long.’ Even the wilting toast escaped censure. ‘I quite like the toast soft rather than crunchy. It makes you concentrate on the cheese more.’ Maybe due to the beer or the mature Cheddar, Grigson’s Welsh rabbit had a profound depth of flavour, addictive yet satisfying. ‘Of course, I prefer your eggy version,’ Mrs H added diplomatically, ‘but this is a real treat.’ Milk will probably also work well in the dish. (A friend of mine had a Lancashire grandfather whose favourite meal was grilled cheese with milk. His method was to put milk and bits of cheese on a tin plate, toast it under the grill and mop up the result with bread.)

Keen to keep up the fusillade of cheesy billets d’amour, I tried the version advocated by several professional cooks, which involves making the topping first and allowing it to set. Melt a knob of butter in a saucepan, stir in a small quantity of flour, a pinch of mustard powder, a hint of cayenne and a few splats of Worcestershire sauce, then add a good splash of Guinness and half a pound of good grated cheese. When it’s turned creamy, turn out the cheesy mixture into a container and leave to set in the fridge. This is then spread on toast and grilled. Cheese-on-toast purists may complain that the protracted nature of this style of Welsh rabbit lacks spontaneity. You have to think ahead. However, it is very quick to make when you have the topping in the fridge, which explains its appeal for chefs. Most significantly, its intense flavour transported Mrs H to a transcendental plateau of pleasure. ‘Coo!’

I turned to the subcontinent for my next variation. Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert of the Madras Cavalry was, I’m sorry to say, a rarebit man. In Culinary Jottings for Madras (1885), he observes: ‘For a really good Welsh rarebit, you should have a sound fresh cheese, not over-strong.’ But his other ingredients do not eschew piquancy. You are instructed to mix two ounces grated cheese with one ounce of butter, two egg yolks, a dessertspoon of English mustard, salt, and a pinch of something called ‘Nepaul pepper’ (apparently it was along the lines of cayenne, though not quite as strong) until thoroughly smooth. I used Double Gloucester and substituted a tiny amount of cayenne for the mysterious Nepaul stuff. The bright yellow result is spread on toast that has been buttered on both sides (the Col’s italics) and baked in a buttered pie dish in a really hot oven for ten minutes.

With its brown and gold topping, the result looked tempting. ‘It’s quite mustardy,’ said Mrs H after taking her first nibble. ‘In fact, it’s very mustardy. Phew!’ While not exactly unpalatable, it was an astonishingly robust, take-no-prisoners Victorian snack, somehow both rich and austere. Mrs H quite liked it, but I found the overdose of English mustard slightly queasy-making.

‘The Colonel must have liked his food very hot,’ said Mrs H. ‘It’s OK but I don’t agree with him that it is a really good Welsh rarebit.’

‘Rabbit.’

‘Well, he says rarebit.’

Cheesed off with this bickering, I decided to sort out the moniker once and for all. Jane Grigson said that it has to be ‘rabbits, not rarebits or rare bits, which are both false etymological refinement’. The OED dates Welsh rabbit to 1725, with rarebit appearing sixty years later. In the forthright view of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, ‘Welsh rabbit is amusing and right. Rarebit is stupid and wrong.’ According to Peter Graham’s Classic Cheese Cookery, the ‘Welsh’ part may have stemmed from that nation’s traditional fondness for cheese, which is alluded to in The Merry Wives of Windsor (the jealous Frank Ford declares: ‘I would rather trust…the Welshman with my cheese…than my wife with herself’), but it was probably also a joke against the Welsh. In the unremittingly carnivorous eighteenth century, Welsh rabbit was a substitute for the real thing, ersatz, a bit of a con. If the expression was originally pejorative, the Welsh have had the last laugh. Two other national variants in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), Scotch rabbit (pretty much plain cheese on toast) and English rabbit, have both failed to stay the course.

I decided to make English rabbit as the next volley in my campaign to retain the heart of Mrs H. Hannah Glasse’s recipe seems to derive from the medieval dish of sops, which is bits of bread soaked in wine. (In Richard III, one of the murderers of the Duke of Clarence says, ‘Let’s make a sop of him,’ before that gruesome business involving a butt of malmsey.) You pour a glass of red wine over a slice of brown toast ‘and let it soak the wine up; then cut some cheese very thin, and lay it very thick over the bread, and put it in a tin oven before the fire, and it will be toasted and brown’d presently. Serve it away hot.’ Made with Lancashire and Chianti, the snack, not quite as soggy as you might expect, proved to be a mystery mouthful for Mrs H. ‘I don’t know what the underneath is. Tell me. Tell me.’ I cruelly refused to say. Like most females, Mrs H cannot bear the withholding of information. ‘Tell me. Tell me! TELL ME!’

Eventually she twigged without me spilling the beans. ‘Is it something to do with wine?’ The dish caused a diversion of opinion. I thought it was an interesting combination of flavours, slightly like fondue, that delivered a nice, boozy aftertaste. Mrs H was unpersuaded. ‘Five out of ten. There’s a slight bitterness there that doesn’t entirely appeal. It’s middling.’

I then tried the Scotch rabbit recipe in Peter Graham’s Classic Cheese Cookery. This is entirely different from Hannah Glasse’s but it does have the merit of being authentically Scotch. It appeared in The Cook and Housewife’s Manual (1826) by Margaret Dods, the nom-de-plume of Christian Isabel Johnstone, a Peebles pub landlady. Using a cast-iron saucepan over a gentle heat, you stir together five ounces of Stilton (or Gouda) with four table spoons of stout (Graham recommends Mackeson but I used Guinness), one teaspoon of ready-made English mustard and a lot of black pepper. When transformed into a smooth cream, pour into ramekins and brown under a hot grill. Eat with hot buttered toast. ‘Quite nice,’ Mrs H hesitated. ‘A bit like dunking a biscuit in tea. It’s rather drippy. The Stilton is a bit odd.’ This was not quite the reaction that I was aiming for. She ate it all though.

Pushing my luck, I then made her another rarity from Graham’s book called Irish rarebit. He admits that this dish, which appeared in a First World War cookbook, has no obvious association with Ireland. ‘Perhaps the other nationalities had been used up,’ he suggests. A combination of grated Cheddar, fried sweet onions, chopped gherkins, fresh herbs and a reduction of ‘best vinegar’ (I used red wine vinegar) is cooked first in a frying pan and then grilled on toast. Unfortunately, it did not prove to be the food of love. Mrs H was alarmed by the smell (‘Poo!’) and dismayed by the taste. ‘What are we eating?’ This highly assertive dish was marginally better cold, when its acetic aggression had calmed down. Since cold, vinegary cheese on toast is not renowned as an aphrodisiac, I broadened my research.

The more you look into cheese on toast, the more possibilities you find. Food historian Dorothy Hartley suggested: ‘For a rich rabbit, fry the bread in bacon fat.’ I didn’t put that oily treat in front of Mrs H, but an anchovy-enhanced version from Patricia Michelson’s book The Cheese Room went down well. Entitled ‘A Sort of Welsh Rarebit’, the recipe specifies fillets from salted whole anchovies. These are excellent but somewhat hard to locate. I found standard anchovy fillets worked fine. You make anchovy butter, by mashing four anchovy fillets into two ounces of butter. Use it to butter some slices of toast. Pile thin slices of cheese (Michelson suggests Caerphilly) into a dome on the toast, splat on some Worcestershire sauce and grill until the cheese melts and turns gold. ‘Rather nice,’ said Mrs H. ‘Subtle, not too salty. Quite a revelation. I was expecting it to be a bit harsh but it’s not strong at all. Very impressive.’

She was even more impressed by a dipping version of cheese on toast. Lady Shaftesbury’s toasted cheese, which appears in Jane Grigson’s English Food, comes from the recipe book of the wife of the Victorian social reformer Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. However, the dish is not all that grand. ‘By the standards of the aristocracy they were poor.’ Intended to feed six, Lady Shaftesbury’s snack requires rather small quantities: two ounces of butter, seven ounces of grated Cheddar, six tablespoons of cream, two egg yolks, salt and pepper. Impossibly titchy, I thought, but the combination of dairy products is very rich. You don’t want much. (A food blogger who ate rather a lot of it reported nightmares.) The ingredients are mixed together in a saucepan and stirred over a low heat until dissolved into a thick cream. You then pour this into six small ovenproof dishes or ramekins and brown under the grill. Serve with toast fingers. Mrs H’s reaction: ‘Marvellous. Like an individual fondue. Hurray for Lady Shaftesbury!’ This was everything I could have hoped for, though I would have preferred ‘Hurray for Christopher.’