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Wellspent Market founder Jim Dixon has been writing about food and restaurants for Willamette Week for a long time. He wants our readers to eat well, and he shows them how with the recipes he creates just for us by using simple cooking techniques and easy-to-find ingredients.
We came to London to watch Jinkx Monsoon perform. Monsoon, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2013, stars in a revival of Peter Quilter’s 2005 End of the Rainbow about Judy Garland’s last months. My wife Judith Rizzio worked with Jinkx in Grant High School’s theater program, and Judith likes to say that she was the first to put Jinkx in drag. The show was incredible, and you’ve still time to see it if you’re up for the long trip.
We stayed in Soho, and during my pilgrimage to what many consider the world’s best cheese shop in Neal’s Yard, I stumbled across the St. John wine bar, an unknown-to-me offshoot of Fergus Henderson’s restaurant of the same name. Henderson, while probably not the first to use it, popularized the phrase “nose to tail” with his cookbook Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking featuring recipes using all the gnarly bits most eaters avoid, explaining that “it seems common sense and even polite to the animal to use all of it.”
I’d met Henderson at the first Feast in 2012 when I gave him a ride back to his hotel from a late-night afterparty. So I had to go in and eat, and an order of his version of Welsh rarebit was mandatory. It’s basically cheese on toast but with a derogatory name that stems from the centuries-long enmity between England and Wales (the Welsh sometimes refer to their homeland as England’s first colony). The simple dish was first noted in the early 1700s as “Welsh rabbit,” and nobody knows just how it became rarebit. There’s no record of it in Welsh cuisine, and to some it seems to be a sneering implication that the Welsh were so poor and ignorant that they put cheese on bread and called it rabbit.
But even with the confusing name, Welsh rarebit is delicious. It takes many forms, but Henderson’s uses a simple roux, with the flavor boosted by dry mustard, cayenne, and what he describes as a “very long splash of Worcestershire sauce.” The “very strong, mature” cheddar he calls for can be hard to find in the U.S., but a nice sharp one is OK, if maybe not quite as flavorful. And while almost any bread will taste great blanketed by the cheese sauce, a fine-crumbed white bread provides the most English-y substrate.
Recipe adapted from Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating; makes enough for 4-6 pieces
1 tablespoon butter (what the English call a “knob”)
1 tablespoon flour
1 teaspoon mustard powder
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
¾ cup Guinness stout or similar dark, malty beer
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
8 ounces sharp Cheddar cheese, grated
4-6 slices of bread, toasted
Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat, stir in the flour, and let it cook together for a minute or two. Stir in the mustard powder and cayenne, then add the beer and Worcestershire. Let this come to gentle simmer, then add the grated cheese in small handfuls, stirring each into the roux before adding more.
Cook for another few minutes, then remove from the heat and let cool and thicken for another 10 minutes or so. Spread a thickish layer on each piece of toast and broil until the sauce is bubbling and lightly browned. Eat while it’s hot with a splash of Worcestershire.
