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Rennet, Gallino
Gallino rennet is that which is made from the rough coating of the gizzards of fowls or turkeys, and milk coagulated with it is more delicate than it would be if common rennet were used. To prepare it, carefully preserve the skin of the gizzards when about to dress poultry. Cleanse it thoroughly, and rub it well with salt. Stretch it out, and let it dry. About the same quantity of skin must be soaked as is needed for ordinary rennet, and it should be laid into water the night before it is wanted for use.
This is an ingredient preparation rather than a dish: a home-made milk coagulant for junkets, curds and soft cheese. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the points below explain where it fails.
- Raw poultry tissue, air-driedThe gizzard lining is peeled from freshly dressed poultry, rubbed with an unmeasured quantity of salt, and dried in open air at whatever temperature the room happens to be. That is a curing process with no measured salt concentration, no controlled humidity and no temperature figure, on a tissue routinely carrying Salmonella and Campylobacter.
- The overnight soakSoaking the dried skin in plain water "the night before it is wanted" gives any surviving organisms a nutrient bath at room temperature for eight to twelve hours. The infusion is then added to milk, not cooked in it.
- Nothing is ever heatedJunkets and curds set with rennet are held warm — blood heat at most — and eaten soft. No step in the chain from gizzard to bowl reaches a temperature that would kill a pathogen, and in the original context the milk itself would have been unpasteurised.
- Strength is unknowableThe recipe says only to soak "about the same quantity of skin" as for ordinary rennet. There is no way to gauge coagulating power from a piece of dried membrane, so the result is as likely to be a milk that never sets as one that sets cleanly.
- What to use insteadStandardised liquid or tablet rennet, animal or microbial, is sold with a stated strength and dosing table. Use a current recipe for junket or fresh cheese and follow the strength given on the bottle.
- On "gallino"The word appears to derive from the Romance root for hen, gallina (Latin gallina); it evidently marks this as poultry rennet as distinct from the calf's-stomach rennet usually meant by "common rennet".
Before rennet was sold in bottles, dairies commonly made their own, and the usual source was the fourth stomach of an unweaned calf, salted and dried much as this recipe describes for poultry. Gizzard linings were a thrifty by-product of a household that dressed its own fowls, and the claim that they gave a more delicate curd than calf rennet is traditional rather than demonstrated — the avian gizzard lining is a tough keratinoid membrane, and it is the glandular stomach, not the gizzard, that secretes digestive enzymes. Dried chicken gizzard lining has a long independent life as a remedy in Chinese materia medica, where it is valued for digestion. Standardised rennet extract was manufactured commercially in Denmark from the 1870s and spread through the dairy trade, and later cookery books tend to drop the home-cured versions in favour of a stated dose.