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Fruit Junket
Make with junket tablets according to given directions on all such packages. Fill large dish or individual serving cups or sherbert glasses with fruit, fresh or stewed, sweetened, about one-half full. On this pour the tablet when dissolved according to instructions. Let this "set" till quite firm before placing on ice to chill.
This is a rennet custard, not a gelatin dessert, and everything about it depends on the rennet enzyme surviving contact with the milk. The original assumes the cook has a package of junket tablets on the shelf and knows what to do with them; here is what those instructions used to say.
- What a junket tablet isA tablet of rennet, the coagulating enzyme from a calf's stomach, usually with a little sugar or salt as filler. Rennet tablets sold for cheesemaking can work in its place, but they are often far more concentrated than junket tablets, so go by the strength stated on the package rather than by any fixed fraction of a tablet.
- The hinge is temperatureWarm the milk to lukewarm, about 98-110F, and no hotter. Rennet works best around blood heat; well above that its activity falls away, and by about 140F the enzyme is destroyed and the junket will never set. Below body heat it sets slowly. A thermometer removes the guesswork the old packages left to the wrist.
- Do not move it once mixedStir the dissolved tablet in for a few seconds, then leave the dish absolutely still. Rennet curd is fragile while forming, and jostling it during the ten to fifteen minutes it takes to set breaks the gel and leaves you with whey and lumps. This is why the recipe insists it be quite firm before it goes on ice.
- Ultra-pasteurized milk will failUHT and ultra-pasteurized milk have denatured proteins that rennet cannot knit together. Use ordinary pasteurized whole milk. Skim milk sets, but weakly and thinly.
- Fruits that prevent settingFresh pineapple, papaya, kiwi and figs carry proteases that digest milk protein and will keep the junket soupy. Cooked or canned versions of these are harmless, which is one reason the original offers stewed fruit as an option.
- Drain the fruitAcid is the other enemy. Sweetened stewed fruit sitting in its syrup will leak juice into the milk and curdle it into grainy whey. Drain the fruit well and let it come to room temperature before the milk goes over it.
- Sweetening and flavorSweeten and flavor the milk before adding the rennet, not after. A tablespoon of sugar and a little vanilla per pint is the usual proportion; anything stirred in afterward wrecks the set.
- YieldA pint of milk fills four small cups or sherbet glasses over fruit. Serve the day it is made, as rennet junket weeps whey by the second day.
Junket is one of the oldest sweets in English cookery, a soft rennet curd eaten with cream and sugar, and its name is generally traced to the Norman-French jonquette, a little rush basket in which fresh curds were drained. For centuries it was made by the household dairy with a scrap of rennet from a calf's stomach; by the time this book was written, tablets sold under brand names had reduced the whole process to a warmed cup of milk and a printed direction slip, which is exactly why the author felt no need to give proportions. Junket carried a strong association with the sickroom and the nursery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, being bland, barely cooked and easy to swallow, and dressing it up with fruit in sherbet glasses was the standard way of promoting it from invalid food to a dessert fit for company.