Welsh rarebit cause boby, good roasted cheese." In Boorde's account, "cause boby" is the Welsh "", meaning "baked cheese", but whether it implies a recipe like Welsh rarebit is a matter of speculation. The word "rarebit" is a corruption of "rabbit", "Welsh rabbit" being first recorded in 1725 and the variant "Welsh rarebit" being first recorded in 1785 by Francis Grose. According to the "Oxford English Dictionary", 'Welsh rarebit' is an "etymologizing alteration. There is no evidence of the independent use of rarebit". The word "rarebit" has no other use than in Welsh rabbit. "Eighteenth-century English cookbooks reveal that it was then
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