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Junket
1 quart of milk 1 tablespoonful of rennet wine 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar 1 teaspoonful of vanilla Warm the milk slightly, add the sugar and vanilla, and stir until the sugar is dissolved; add the rennet wine, stir quickly, and turn at once into the dish in which it is to be served. Let it stand perfectly quiet for ten minutes until set. It may then be lifted carefully to a cold place. Serve very cold with sugar and cream.
A rennet custard, set by enzyme rather than heat or gelatin, and the whole thing turns on milk temperature. Everything else is easy.
- "Warm slightly" means 98-105F"Warm slightly" means blood heat, about 98-105F -- Rennet is most active around body temperature. Below about 90F it sets slowly, and milk hot to the touch will weaken or destroy the enzyme, leaving you with sweet warm milk that never firms. A thermometer removes all the guesswork here.
- Rennet wineThis was a liquid rennet extract preserved in wine or sherry, sold by druggists. Substitute junket tablets (one tablet per quart, crushed and dissolved in a little cold water) or a few drops of liquid animal or microbial rennet. Follow the strength on the bottle rather than the tablespoon in the original.
- Do not use UHT milkUltra-pasteurized and shelf-stable milk will not coagulate properly with rennet; the proteins have been altered by the heat. Ordinary pasteurized whole milk works well, and the higher fat gives a softer, less watery curd.
- Stir once, then leave it aloneThe instruction to turn it out at once and let it stand "perfectly quiet" is the hinge. Any movement after the curd begins to knit breaks it and the whey separates out, leaving a grainy set in a puddle.
- Set first, chill secondTen minutes at room temperature is about right for setting; then move it to the refrigerator. Chilling it before it sets stalls the enzyme and you may get nothing.
- Serve in the dish it sets inThis is not an unmoulding dessert. Use individual cups or a shallow glass bowl, since the curd is too fragile to transfer.
- YieldA quart serves four to six in small cups. It is best eaten the day it is made; by the next day it will have wept whey.
Junket is one of the oldest names in English dessert cookery, generally traced to the Norman French jonquette, a fresh curd cheese drained on a mat of rushes (jonc) — the name of the container eventually attaching itself to what was in it. By the nineteenth century it meant specifically a sweetened milk set with rennet, and it was prized as much for the sickroom as the table: bland, cold, mildly digestible, and recommended for children and invalids on the traditional grounds that the rennet had begun the work of digestion before the spoon did. Commercial rennet extracts and tablets, sold for household use from the later 1800s, put it within reach of any cook, and its appearance in a book of hot weather dishes is entirely practical — no oven, no custard to watch over a fire, no gelatin to melt in the heat, just warm milk set in ten minutes and carried to a cold place.