Welsh rarebit The sauce may also be made by blending cheese and mustard into a Béchamel sauce. Some recipes for Welsh rarebit have become textbook savoury dishes listed by culinary authorities including Auguste Escoffier, Louis Saulnier and others, who tend to use the form Welsh "rarebit", emphasizing that it is not a meat dish. Acknowledging that there is more than one way to make a rarebit, some cookbooks have included two recipes: the "Boston Cooking-School Cook Book" of 1896 provides one béchamel-based recipe and another with beer, "Le Guide Culinaire" of 1907 has one with ale and one without, and the "Constance
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip. Despite the strip's bleak view, McCay's work was so popular that William Randolph Hearst hired him in 1911 with a star's salary. Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane deemed McCay's work "serious, not funny", and had the cartoonist give up his comic strips (including "Rarebit Fiend" and "Nemo") to work full-time illustrating editorials. Scholars such as Claude Moliterni, Ulrich Merkl, Alfredo Castelli, and others have hunted down what they believe to have influenced McCay's work on "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend". Among the possible influences are Edward Lear's popular "The Book of Nonsense" (1870), Gelett Burgess' "The Burgess Nonsense Book" (1901),