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Cold Custard
1 Cold Custard is made precisely the same as Junket adding two well beaten eggs to the milk before warming.
This one line depends entirely on the junket recipe it points back to: milk warmed to blood heat, rennet stirred in, left undisturbed to set. Adding raw eggs to that process produces a dish in which the eggs are never cooked, and that is why it cannot be recommended today.
- Why the eggs never get hot enoughRennet coagulates milk only within a narrow warm range and loses its activity at temperatures below those used to cook an egg custard. Warming the milk further would prevent the junket from setting, so the method as written never brings the eggs near cooking temperature.
- Raw shell egg riskTwo beaten eggs stirred into barely warm milk, then held at room temperature to set and eaten cold, is an untreated raw-egg preparation. Salmonella in shell eggs is the specific hazard, and the dish offers no step that reduces it.
- The warm holding periodRennet junket must stand undisturbed at close to body temperature until firm, then be chilled without stirring; it cannot be set in the refrigerator. That warm standing period adds to the problem, though the main hazard remains the uncooked egg.
- What to make insteadIf you want a cold set custard, use a current recipe for a stirred or baked custard, where the eggs are brought to temperature and the set comes from the egg rather than from rennet.
- Junket, for reference"Junket" here means milk clotted with rennet, not a flavoured gelatin dessert. Rennet tablets and liquid animal or microbial rennet are still sold, mainly to home cheesemakers, and the plain eggless junket is a different proposition from this one.
Rennet desserts were common in the nineteenth-century sickroom and at the summer table, valued because they set without boiling, without ice and without an oven. Rennet, an extract of calf stomach lining, had long been used to curdle milk for cheese before it was sold to households in tablet and liquid form as "junket" or "essence of rennet" for puddings. Adding eggs was one way to enrich a plain junket and edge it toward the flavour and colour of a custard without lighting a fire; the recipe's brevity — one sentence, no quantities — suggests the writer assumed the reader had the junket recipe to hand. Much of the appeal of such desserts lay in what they did not require, in a period when a summer kitchen with a coal range was somewhere to escape from.