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Junket
Put a pint of milk, a table-spoonful of sugar, a wine-glassful of brandy, and a tea-spoonful of rennet into a glass pudding-dish. Stir until the sugar is dissolved, cover it, and place it in front of the fire, or any warm place, to heat sufficiently for the rennet to act. As soon as it is set, remove it to a cool place. Serve with cream, and flavour with nutmeg grated over the surface.
A rennet custard that sets without heat from the oven or the stove. Everything depends on the temperature of the milk and on the rennet still being alive when it meets it.
- Milk must not be ultra-pasteurisedUHT and ultra-pasteurised milk will not coagulate properly with rennet, and neither will most reduced-fat milk that has been heavily heat-treated. Ordinary pasteurised whole milk sets cleanly.
- Temperature is the hingeRennet works best at about 98-105F and loses activity as the milk gets hotter, so keep it under about 110F. "In front of the fire" means blood-warm, no hotter; if the milk is scalding when the rennet goes in, it will not set.
- Rennet strength has changedVictorian domestic rennet was not standardised, and modern liquid rennet and junket tablets are sold at their own strengths; follow the package dose for a pint of milk rather than assuming the teaspoonful given here.
- A wine-glassfulRoughly 2 fl oz by Victorian reckoning. Two ounces of brandy in a pint of milk is a lot of alcohol for a set custard and may interfere with the set; halve it if the junket refuses to firm up.
- Stir first, then leave aloneDissolve the sugar and mix the rennet in quickly, then do not touch the dish. Any movement once setting begins breaks the curd and the junket weeps whey instead of holding as a single soft mass.
- Chill to stop it"Remove it to a cool place" would have meant a cold larder; the refrigerator is the modern equivalent. Left warm, the curd goes on contracting and squeezes out whey.
- Timing and yieldSetting takes about 10 to 15 minutes in a warm place, then an hour or two chilled. A pint serves two to three as a light sweet.
Junket is one of the oldest sweet dishes in English cookery and the name is generally traced to the Old French jonquette, a fresh curd drained in a basket of rushes (Latin juncus), with Italian giuncata a cognate; "junket" first meant the basket, then the cream cheese carried in it, and finally any soft rennet-set milk. By the time Cassell's was compiled, rennet had moved from the farmhouse, where cooks steeped a piece of dried calf's stomach in brine, to the chemist's shop: standardised rennet extract was being manufactured commercially from the 1870s, and pre-measured junket tablets followed. Its place in "The Principles of Cookery" is deliberate, since it demonstrates coagulation by enzyme rather than by heat, the same reaction that underlies all cheesemaking, in a form the household could put on the table with cream and nutmeg.