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
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend rarebit theme instead of tobacco, and McCay complied. The strip appeared in a "Herald" subsidiary, the "Evening Telegram", and the "Herald"s editor required McCay to use a pseudonym for the strip work to keep it separate from his other work. McCay signed "Rarebit Fiend" strips as "Silas", a name he borrowed from a neighborhood garbage cart driver. After switching to William Randolph Hearst's "New York American" newspaper in 1911, McCay dropped the "Silas" pseudonym and signed his work with his own name. McCay married in 1891, and the marriage was not a happy one. According to McCay biographer John Canemaker,