Writing Portfolio

5.10.17

Welsh rarebit, courtesy of Ainsley Harriott

Browsing in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago, I happened across a cookery book by Ainsley Harriott. Remember him? He was a TV cook back in the Nineties, appearing on shows like Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook and Good Morning with Anne and Nick. I recall that one year, Alex and I bought one of his books, Ainsley Harriott’s Barbecue Bible, as a birthday present for Dad. Like quite a few other things that were big in Britain in the Nineties, such as Frank Skinner and Red Dwarf, his star may have waned but he’s still doing stuff, having resurfaced on Strictly a couple of years ago (Frank Skinner and Red Dwarf, by the way, are also still going, although the former isn’t as funny as he used to be and the latter is on Dave rather than the BBC these days).

Ainsley is still keeping his hand in with the cooking, for the book that I found was a (relatively) recent offering, published in 2009 by BBC Books no less. Just Five Ingredients is just what it says on the cover, offering (so says the blurb) “a collection of mouth-watering dishes that use a maximum of five ingredients – perfect for the time-short, budget-conscious cook.” Funnily enough, that’s the concept behind Jamie Oliver’s latest book, so you could say that Ainsley is ahead of the curve.



On flipping through Just Five Ingredients I saw a few recipes that I liked the sound of, so I bought the book which now stands next to another recent acquisition, Rick Stein’s Long Weekends. The first recipe as made from the book was Welsh rarebit – cheese on toast, but with the cheese grated and made into a sauce of sorts before being put onto the bread and toasted. No rabbits are involved (much like the toads that are absent from toad-in-the-hole and the woodcock that doesn’t appear in Scotch woodcock), and quite why it’s spelt ‘rarebit’ rather than ‘rabbit’ I am not entirely sure, although this dish is the only time when ‘rabbit’ is spelt as ‘rarebit’.

What goes into the sauce as well as grated cheese is a matter for debate; looking through some of our other cook books, there are a few variations although Worcestershire sauce and mustard of some sort (usually but not always English) are common features. Nigel Slater (in Real Fast Food) complains of “mixtures that will not thicken or that turn irretrievably lumpy”; he reckons on adding butter and a couple of tablespoons of beer, with the result to be eaten “as a snack with the rest of the beer”. Delia Smith has a Welsh Rarebit Soufflé (in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and Welsh Rarebit Jacket Potatoes (in Delia’s How to Cook: Book One); the former includes butter, flour, French mustard, milk, eggs and cayenne pepper, while the latter has finely grated onion and “1 tablespoon Red Onion, Tomato and Chilli Relish (see page 188)”. Jamie Oliver’s, which can be found in Jamie at Home, is not just Welsh rarebit but “Welsh rarebit with attitude”, containing eggs, crème fraiche and “4 tablespoons of cheeky chilli-pepper chutney (see page 321) or shop-bought chilli jam”; like Slater, he says it’s best to have it with beer. Common consensus is that the cheese to be used is Cheddar, although Slater hedges his bets; “Stilton or Cheddar have enough of a tang to be interesting, Caerphilly or Wensleydale less so”. Going way back, Mrs Beeton calls for Cheshire or Gloucester cheese (she, of course, was writing at a time before Cheddar became the nation’s cheese of choice); she didn’t grate it, advocating that the cheese be sliced, toasted and then have “a little made mustard and a seasoning of pepper” spread over it. Mrs Beeton also has a recipe for Scotch Rarebit which involves a contraption called a “cheese toaster with hot-water reservoir”.

Ainsley’s five ingredients are vintage Cheddar cheese, eggs, English mustard, Worcesteshire sauce and, or course, bread (as far as he’s concerned, salt and pepper aren’t counted among the five ingredients, which is fair enough). The cheese is grated, the egg is separated. The yolk, along with the mustard and the Worecestershire sauce, is mixed in with the cheese. Then the egg white is whisked into stiff peaks – on reading this I groaned, for here was a job for the electric mixer which would in turn involve more washing-up afterwards than I’d hoped. Anyway, once whisked, the egg whites are folded into the mix (just like in Delia’s soufflé; Jamie, by contrast, only uses the yolks). It’s then baked in the oven until “risen and lightly browned”.




The result was very nice indeed. On the basis of this, I shall be using other recipes from this book, or maybe even using this one for other recipes, for Ainsley says that it can also be used to cover his salmon fish pie “(see page 130)”, or for “an interesting twist on cauliflower cheese!”

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