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w's milk; toast it at the fire on both sides, but not so much as to drop (melt). Toast on one side a piece of bread less than 1/4 inch thick, to be quite crisp, and spread it very thinly with fresh, cold butter on the toasted side. (It must not be saturated.) Lay the toasted cheese upon the untoasted bread side and serve immediately on a very hot plate. The butter on the toast can, of course, be omitted. (It is more frequently eaten without butter.)
From this original toasting of the cheese many Englishmen still call Welsh Rabbit "Toasted Cheese," but Lady Llanover goes on to point out that the Toasted Rabbit of her Wales and the Melted or Stewed Buck Rabbit of England (which has become our American standard) are as different in the making as the regional cheeses used in them, and she says that while doctors prescribed the toasted Welsh as salubrious for invalids, the stewed cheese of Olde England was "only adapted to strong digestions."
English literature rings with praise for the toasted cheese of Wales and England. There is Christopher North's eloquent "threads of unbeaten gold, shining like gossamer filaments (that may be pulled from its tough and tenacious substance)."
Yet not all of the references are complimentary.
Thus Shakespeare in King Lear:
Look, look a mouse! Peace, peace;--this piece of toasted cheese will do it.
And Sydney Smith's:
Old friendships are destroyed by toasted cheese, and hard salted meat has led to suicide.
But Khys Davis in My Wales makes up for such rudenesses:
The Welsh Enter Heaven
The Lord had been complaining to St. Peter of the dearth of good singers in Heaven. "Yet," He said testily, "I hear excellent singing outside the walls. Why are not those singers here with me?"
St. Peter said, "They are the Welsh. They refuse to come in; they say they are happy enough outside, playing with a ball and boxing and singing such songs as 'Suspan Fach'"
The Lord said, "I wish