Welcome to September 3, National Welsh Rarebit Day! It was originally called “Welsh rabbit”, even though it doesn’t contain any rabbit, and the ingredients probably wouldn’t even appeal to rabbits. It’s a pretty simple dish; basically just cheese on toast. The name has morphed into “rarebit” instead of “rabbit” because too many people were confused. It didn’t help that the dish has been known by other names, and nearly all of them have something to do with rabbits or bunnies: “buck rabbit,” “blushing bunny,” “English rabbit,” “Scotch rabbit,” and so on. Nobody knows where the name came from, but it first appeared in a cookbook in 1725. For that matter, nobody really knows where the dish came from, except that they’re pretty sure it wasn’t Wales.
The biggest question about Welsh Rarebit, and believe me, there are a lot of questions, is probably how and why it has its own day. Unfortunately nobody knows that either. But you wouldn’t believe how many foods have their own days. Most of them are limited to a particular country — May 18 is National Marshmallow Day in Australia, and March 25 is National Waffle Day in Sweden. But there are some foods that have moved up to the big time and have international days.
The foods with their own international days include basics like carrots (April 4), milk (June 1), and coconut (June 26), but also sushi (June 18) and porridge (October 18).
When you talk about porridge, of course, you might mean Genesis P-Orridge. Genesis’ birth name was Neil Megson, but they changed it informally when they were 15, and did the formal legal change as soon as they turned 21. They either invented or developed and popularized industrial music while they were in the group “Throbbing Gristle.” But possibly their most avant-garde project was their marriage to Lady Jaye and the subsequent Pandrogeny Project. That was an attempt to combine Genesis and Lady Jaye as a single entity (a — or possibly “the” — “pandrogyne”). The project lasted for years until Lady Jaye’s death, and involved plastic surgery to make them resemble each other as closely as possible. Genesis would have said that the project continued for years afterward.
Genesis P-Orridge wanted to involve viewers, readers, and listeners in their creative output by presenting something that you don’t expect, so you might change the way you’re thinking about the experience. John Ashbery, who passed away on September 3, 2017, did the same sort of thing with his poems. They were famously incomprehensible — “Amid Mounting Evidence” starts with dinosaurs and ends with:
“Yet this toothache that never seems to go away,” (yes, it ends in a comma).
If Ashbery was writing about a real toothache (you can never tell with Ashbery), he might have consulted John Brallier. He was a dentist in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, but is more widely known as the first professional football player. At least he was the first to openly admit it. It happened on September 3, 1895. Brallier had graduated high school as a star quarterback and was getting ready to leave for college on a sports scholarship. Latrobe had its own football team, but the quarterback couldn’t play that day. So the manager contacted Brallier, who was 17 at the time, and offered him $10 per game if he’d play for the team. Brallier wasn’t convinced, so the manager, David Berry, added another enhancement to the deal: some cakes. They must have been pretty good cakes, because that apparently did it. Brallier played, and the team won.
It turned out later (sixty-five years later, in fact) that Pudge Heffelfinger had been paid to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association three years earlier, but nobody, including Pudge, admitted it at the time because of concerns about amateur status. Heffelfinger made a much better deal than Brallier, though; he got $500, although there’s no mention of cake.
In 1950, Nino Farina made no secret about being paid to drive racing cars for Alfa Romeo. He’d been the Italian racing champion several times, but in 1950 he became the first World Champion on September 3, in the new “Formula One” racing series. In 1950 Formula One cars were relatively fast, but nothing close to what they are today. And their speed wasn’t even anywhere near the record set by Malcolm Campbell fifteen years earlier, on September 3, 1935. He drove his Bluebird car 304 miles per hour on the Bonneville Salt Flats — the first person to top 300 mph.
Campbell was British, so although nobody seems to have made note of how he celebrated his speed record, it might have been with a delicious dinner of Welsh rarebit. And if he did, that might finally explain why September 3, in the US (where he set the record) is National Welsh Rarebit day. It’s possible, right?
