Legends and humour[edit]
The notion that toasted cheese was a favourite dish irresistible to the Welsh has existed since the Middle Ages. In A C Merie Talys (100 Merry Tales), a printed book of jokes of 1526 AD (of which William Shakespeare made some use), it is told that God became weary of all the Welshmen in heaven, 'which with their krakynge and babelynge trobelyd all the others', and asked the Porter of Heaven Gate, St Peter, to do something about it. So St Peter went outside the gates and called in a loud voice ' Cause bobe, yt is as moche to say as rostyd chese ': at which all the Welshmen ran out, and when St Peter saw they were all outside, he went in and locked the gates, which is why there are no Welshmen in heaven. The 1526 compiler says he found this story 'Wryten amonge olde gestys'.[28]
A legend mentioned in Betty Crocker's Cookbook claims that Welsh peasants were not allowed to eat rabbits caught in hunts on the estates of the nobility, so they used melted cheese as a substitute. The cookbook writes that Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens ate Welsh rarebit at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub in London.[29] There is no good evidence for any of this; what is more, Ben Jonson died almost a century before the term Welsh rabbit is first attested.[5]
According to the American satirist Ambrose Bierce, the continued use of rarebit was an attempt to rationalise the absence of rabbit, writing in his 1911 Devil's Dictionary: "RAREBIT n. A Welsh rabbit, in the speech of the humorless, who point out that it is not a rabbit. To whom it may be solemnly explained that the comestible known as toad in the hole is really not a toad, and that ris de veau à la financière is not the smile of a calf prepared after the recipe of a she-banker."[30]
American cartoonist Winsor McCay had an intriguing insight into the effects of the Welsh rarebit where characters often awoke from dreams after eating the dish. His comic strip titled Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was published in newspapers from 1904 to 1925,[31] and made into a silent movie of the same name in 1906 (see Dream of a Rarebit Fiend).