American Rarebit

April 14, 2019 3:00 PM

American Rarebit
A comic about food, government cheese, being a latchkey kid, being the child of a latchkey kid, and the power of kraft singles in your life

Role: Creator

posted by The Whelk (6 comments total)

The term "rarebit" means a lot to me, because my stay-at-home mother was not a very good cook, and she knew it and tried to compensate with the frozen foods available in the 1960s... which were not much and not very good either. But one of the best was Stouffer's Welsh Rarebit, which was a yummy cheese sauce that came in a metal tray to cook in a double boiler (which my mother COULD do while I watched the toaster prepare the bread). Kraft Singles were also a staple I discovered early (I think they began individually wrapping them about the time I went off to college), and only recently abandoned when I found Costco's deli department had 2 pound packages of pre-sliced goodies like Tillamook Cheddar (and it has always been a race in my one-person household to finish the whole package before the last few slices got moldy). But I digress.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:43 PM on April 14, 2019

Lovely!
posted by ellieBOA at 12:54 AM on April 15, 2019

Really nice. I was a latch-key kid too, but just a couple hours a day. I made a lot of grilled cheese. Mmmmm.
posted by gryphonlover at 10:44 PM on April 15, 2019

I love it. Dang, I know my partner will side-eye the heck out of it but I may just pick up some white bread* and Kraft singles on the way home tonight.

*To really capture the experience it would have to be bought at the discount bakery for the stuff that sat in the grocery stores too long, but our town is too bougie to have anything like that. Hell, does anywhere have those anymore?
posted by solotoro at 8:07 AM on April 16, 2019

That was great. I never thought about it until now that kids staying home sick from school probably aren't there alone these days. My food of choice was apple cinnamon toast made in the toaster oven, but now I want some Kraft singles...
posted by queensissy at 12:54 PM on April 17, 2019

Lovely comic. I remember the summer I was 11, I refused to go to summer camp -- we had to leave the house by 6:30 and pickup at 6pm, which was longer than the school day, and it was SUMMER, I wanted to sleep in and read and play! So my parents agreed to leave me and my brother (age 8) at home. We didn't have a microwave at the time, so lunch all summer, for me and my brother, were grilled cheese sandwiches with Kraft singles. We had a dedicated kitchen tool for making grilled cheese, with a light that would go on and off at random. Sometimes I would mix it up with a "picnic" i.e. saltine cracker cheese sandwiches -- if you fold a Kraft single in quarters, the resulting squares are exactly the right size for a saltine sandwich. And Costco blueberries for dessert.

To this day, cheese sandwiches and blueberries taste like summer to me.
posted by basalganglia at 2:57 PM on April 21, 2019