Mind your language | 5 December 2009

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.’ On the same page she gives similar recipes for Scotch rabbit and English rabbit. (Actually, Mrs Glasse uses the word receipt for ‘recipe’. I now find that the Oxford English Dictionary includes the following, from a newspaper in 1993: ‘Jennifer Paterson prefers receipt to recipe. It was current in her youth, she says, “in the days before the war, when people spoke English”.’ Perhaps so, but I knew Jennifer Paterson well, and it is far more likely that she picked up the word from Mrs Glasse than from her amah in China before the war.)

Alarmingly, rarebit appears much more frequently than rabbit in the press. A.A. Gill in the Sunday Times characterises pizzas as ‘essentially gay welsh rabbit’. A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Times had Louis de Bernières saying: ‘Lunch might be eggs or welsh rarebit.’ Of course, the spelling is supplied by the paper. Mr de Bernières might prefer rabbit, as does Christopher Hirst, who, in a piece in the Independent, writes: ‘Yes, rabbit, not rarebit, which is an 18th-century genteelism.’