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Junket
An old-fashioned delicacy revived Put 1 pint of cream and 1 pint of milk in double boiler (all cream may be used or all milk); add 1/2 cupful of sugar, pinch of salt. When just lukewarm add 1 junket tablet dissolved in 1 tablespoonful of cold water. Stir thoroughly and pour at once into sherbet glasses, or dainty cups from which it may be eaten. Let stand about ten minutes in warm room till it sets, then put where it will become cold. You cannot use sterilized nor scalded milk. This is a very dainty, wholesome dessert, and may be made very ornamental by dropping a spoonful of dry whipped cream on each glass and dotting it with candied cherries, or it may be colored a delicate rose by adding a drop of fruit coloring.
Junket is set with rennet rather than heat or gelatine, so the whole dish turns on milk temperature and on the milk itself.
- The hinge: blood heat, no hotter"Just lukewarm" means blood heat, roughly 98-105F, tested on the inside of the wrist. Below about 90F the rennet works sluggishly and may never firm; the enzyme is not destroyed until well above 130F, but milk that feels hot rather than tepid gives a coarse curd.
- Do not disturb it once pouredStir the dissolved tablet in briefly, then pour immediately and leave the glasses absolutely still. Moving or stirring a setting junket breaks the curd and gives a grainy, weeping dessert that will not knit again.
- Junket tablets todayThese are rennet tablets, still sold for cheesemaking and sometimes as dessert tablets. Liquid animal or vegetable rennet works too; a few drops replaces a tablet, so follow the strength on the bottle rather than guessing.
- Why scalded milk failsHeating milk hard denatures the whey proteins and interferes with the curd, which is what the original warning is about. The modern equivalent is ultra-pasteurised or UHT milk and most long-life cream, which will not set at all. Ordinary pasteurised fresh milk sets perfectly well.
- Skip the raw milkThe period instruction points toward unpasteurised milk, since the dessert is never brought above blood heat and nothing in the process kills bacteria. Use pasteurised milk and cream, which the rennet handles without trouble.
- "Dry whipped cream"This means cream beaten stiff enough to hold a clean shape and shed no liquid, not a powdered product. Whip it just to firm peaks and stop before it grains.
- Yield and servingA quart of liquid fills six to eight sherbet glasses. Ten minutes at warm room temperature to set, then at least an hour in the refrigerator; serve the day it is made, as it slowly weeps whey.
- ColouringA single drop of colour is right for the effect described. Add it to the sweetened milk before the rennet goes in, so the mixture needs no more than the brief stir the recipe calls for.
Junket's name is usually traced to Old French jonquette, a rush basket in which fresh curds were drained, and the word was used of a curd dish long before it meant an outing. Setting milk with rennet is one of the oldest dairy techniques there is, the same first step that produces cheese, stopped early and sweetened instead of pressed. Commercial rennet tablets sold under brand names made the dish easy for the late-nineteenth-century household cook, and books of this period that call it "revived" may have an old country sweet returned to fashion in packaged form in mind. The instruction against scalded milk sits alongside the spread of pasteurisation and home sterilising of milk in American kitchens, though the recipe itself says only that such milk will not set.