For once, my husband has backed me up, if on dubious grounds. A friend, of previously good character, astonished us both by insisting that the ‘correct’ form of Welsh rabbit was Welsh rarebit. ‘No, it’s not,’ said my husband. ‘I had one at my club only last week.’
It is difficult to see why rarebit should be accorded stronger explanatory force than rabbit. The lamented Robert Burchfield noted in his edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage: ‘This dish of cheese on toast emerged, with rabbit so spelt, in 1725.’
It is also rabbit in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, By a Lady. Here is her recipe: ‘Toast the Bread on both Sides, then toast the Cheese on one Side, and lay it on the Toast, and with a hot Iron brown the other Side.’
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