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Some Kitchen Kinks: McIlhenny
Junket.- cupful of milk; a few drops of McIlhenny's Vanilla; 1/2 tatablespoonful of sugar; 1 junket tablet; grating of nutmeg. Heat the milk till lukewarm, add vanilla, sugar, and tablet, which has been dissolved in a teaspoonful of water. Mix well, pour into a sherbert cup, cover, and stand in a warm place till the mixture jellies. Grate WHAT THE HOME NURSE OUGHT TO KNOW 1139 nutmeg over the top, and keep in a cold place till ready to use.
Invalid's Ice Cream.-¼ cupful of cream; cupful of milk; 1½ tablespoonfuls of sugar; ½ teaspoonful of McIlhenny's Vanilla.
Mix ingredients in a baking-powder tin. Put on cover, set can in a pail or dish and surround with crushed ice and salt. Turn the can around often, occasionally take off the cover, scrape the cream from the sides as it freezes, and beat it well.
When frozen, pour off the brine, beat cream with a spoon, pack it evenly in the can, and put on the cover. Let stand till ready to serve. Put more ice around the can if needed.
Lemon Ice.- cupful of water; cupful of sugar; 1 lemon.
A rennet custard of the sort once kept on hand for invalids and children. It sets by enzyme rather than heat, so temperature control is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: lukewarm means lukewarmRennet works at roughly body heat and loses its power as the milk gets hotter, failing altogether well short of a simmer. Warm the milk to 100-110F, no more; if it is too hot the mixture will not set, and if it is too cool it will set very slowly or not at all.
- Do not disturb itMix quickly, pour at once, and leave the cup absolutely still. Stirring or moving the dish after the enzyme takes hold breaks the curd and gives a grainy, weeping result rather than a smooth jelly.
- Junket tabletsThese are rennet tablets, still sold for cheesemaking and dessert making; liquid rennet works as well, at the dose on the bottle. Crush the tablet and dissolve it in a teaspoon of cold water before it goes into the milk.
- The vanillaMcIlhenny's Vanilla is the brand this book was promoting. Any vanilla extract does the same work; a few drops is somewhere around 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon for a cup of milk.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe milk amount has lost its fraction in this printing; the sugar reads 1/2 tablespoonful, about 1 1/2 teaspoons. A workable proportion is 1 cup milk to 1 to 2 teaspoons sugar; whole milk sets best, and ultra-pasteurized milk often refuses to set at all.
- Timing and chillingSetting takes about 10 to 15 minutes in a warm spot. Refrigerate as soon as it is firm and eat within a day, since it is barely-heated milk and will not keep.
- YieldOne cup of milk makes a single generous serving or two small ones. Set it in the dish it will be served in, as it cannot be unmoulded.
Junket is the English name for a rennet custard, from the medieval French jonquette, a rush basket in which soft curds were drained. Rennet, the enzyme extract from a calf's stomach that curdles milk for cheese, was sold in tablet form from the late nineteenth century, and the Junket trademark became so familiar in American kitchens that the tablets and the dessert took the same name. It appears here beside an ice cream and a lemon ice in a section on nursing the sick: milk set with rennet was thought easier to digest than a baked custard, needed no oven, and could be flavoured a dozen ways for a patient with no appetite. The named vanilla brand marks the page as advertising copy folded into household advice, a common arrangement in compendiums of this period.