By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
I was in north Wales last week, having a little holiday, when I stumbled upon a book in a Caernarfon charity shop that I should really already have owned. Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage was first published in 1947 but much of Partridge’s advice about good English still holds good today, and deserves its place beside the Brothers Fowlers’ The King’s English on the shelves of any grammatical stickler and pedant.
I opened the book at random and found myself looking at the entry for ‘Welsh rabbit’, and took that as a further sign – standing squarely on Welsh soil as I was at that moment – that I should part with a quid and purchase the thing. So I did.
And then I decided I should blog about Welsh rabbit.
Welsh rabbit isn’t rabbit. It’s cheese on toast, essentially. Recipes vary from place to place but that’s basically what you’ll be getting if someone says they’ll rustle up some Welsh rabbit for you.
But a lot of people don’t call cheese on toast ‘Welsh rabbit’. I mean, many people call it ‘cheese on toast’, which is absolutely understandable. But a lot of other people call it ‘Welsh rarebit’, even though – as Partridge’s book rushed to remind me at that moment in the Caernarfon shop – ‘Welsh rarebit’ isn’t really thing.
I think it’s often assumed by the ‘Welsh rarebit’ fans that ‘Welsh rabbit’ is a jocular corruption of the original name, which they believe to have been ‘rarebit’. But in fact, it was always Welsh rabbit and has been so for longer than it’s been (erroneously) called ‘Welsh rarebit’.
The OED tells the story. On 4 April 1725, the author John Byrom – who elsewhere was the true originator of Tweedledum and Tweedledee – recorded in his journal, ‘I did not eat of the cold beef, but of Welsh rabbit and stewed cheese.’ Just over two decades later, in 1747, Hannah Glasse, in her Art of Cookery, was advising: ‘To make a Welch-Rabbit. 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.’
I’m not sure many people use a hot iron to make their toast these days, but then George Foreman helpfully provided the modern equivalent.
Anyway, it wasn’t until nearer the end of the eighteenth century, in 1781, that ‘Welsh rarebit’ appears to have made its debut. (Amazingly, it would be almost another century until ‘cheese on toast’ was first used, in 1880.) And it’s clearly a corruption of the existing (jokey) name for cheese on toast that was Welsh rabbit. Perhaps it was a sincere attempt to make this most basic of dishes sound a little more refined than it actually is, or perhaps it was a tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic shot at those who treated cheese on toast like some rarefied gourmet’s dream.
But the point is that ‘Welsh rabbit’ was there first. It even got there before ‘Scotch rabbit’, which somehow never stuck as the name for (seasoned or unseasoned) cheese on toast, first recorded in Glasse’s cookbook, in 1747. There’s no suggestion that either the Welsh or the Scots were laying claim to the dish as ‘their’ invention; instead, as the use of both these nationalities suggests, it was an English dig at their neighbours’ supposed lack of culinary adventurousness.
I knew all this before Partridge reminded me of it. But it took my encounter with Usage and Abusage in a charity shop in Wales to make me start thinking about other common phrases which are often misspelt or subtly altered like this. Especially those (rightly or wrongly) involving food.
Partridge’s book has no entry on ‘just desserts’ or, indeed, ‘just deserts’. But the OED only has an entry on the latter, because the latter is the correct spelling of the phrase denoting a person’s appropriate punishment for some transgression or wrongdoing. The word ‘deserts’ here (initially it was used in the singular, such as in its earliest known use in 1548) is linked to the word deserve and means ‘what one deserves’. Like deserve it’s pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, unlike ‘desert’ (the word for an uninhabited region).
So, although Just Desserts is a great name for a cake and ice-cream parlour, it’s not what you need to write when discussing someone’s proportionate punishment.
Both of these phrases and their accompanying corruptions or twisted forms made me recall John Ford’s famous line that ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. The OED has refused to print ‘just desserts’ but has let in ‘Welsh rarebit’. I wonder, though, if the number of people getting their des(s)erts mixed up is not even higher than those getting their rabbits confused with their rarebits. Which sounds painful, not to mention uncomfortable for the rabbit.