Welsh rarebit bread and butter and occasionally with the vinegar from pickled beetroot. The word "Welsh" may have been adopted because it carries a now-archaic sense in English to mean "foreign, non-native" - an etymological phenomenon seen in its ultimate ancestor, the Proto-Germanic "walhaz" ("foreigner") and many of its descendants like the dated sense of German (Romance-speaker). It is also possible that the dish was attributed to the Welsh because they were considered particularly fond of cheese, as evidenced by Andrew Boorde in his "Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge" (1542), when he wrote "I am a Welshman, I do love
Welsh rarebit this; what is more, Ben Jonson died almost a century before the term Welsh rabbit is first attested. 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