Slip
One quart milk (warm as when milked), one tablespoonful wine of the rennet. After the milk is turned, eat it with a dressing of cream, sugar and wine.--Mrs. Dr. E.
Slip is a two-ingredient set custard — junket — that depends entirely on getting the milk to the right temperature and then leaving it strictly alone. Everything else is dressing.
- The hinge: do not move itOnce the rennet goes in, stir it through for a few seconds, then set the dish where it will be eaten and do not touch it until firm. Jarring or tilting the bowl during setting breaks the curd and the whole thing weeps into whey.
- "Warm as when milked"Cow's milk leaves the udder at roughly body temperature, about 100-102F, which is close to the working range for rennet: much below 90F it sets slowly or not at all, and somewhere above about 110F the enzyme starts to lose activity. Warm the milk gently and check it rather than guessing.
- Wine of the rennetThis is a liquid rennet extract, made by steeping a piece of dried calf's stomach in wine or sherry. The modern equivalent is bottled liquid rennet or junket tablets. Homemade extract was variable and generally much weaker than commercial rennet, so follow the strength on the bottle, which for a quart is usually a few drops to half a teaspoon.
- Raw milkThe recipe assumes milk straight from the cow, never heated. Nothing in the method kills pathogens, so use pasteurized milk; it sets identically.
- Ultra-pasteurized milk will not setUHT and ultra-pasteurized milk have been heated hard enough that denatured whey proteins interfere with rennet coagulation, so they set poorly or not at all. Ordinary pasteurized whole milk works; homogenization is not a problem, though it gives a softer curd.
- Setting timeExpect a firm set anywhere from about 10 to 45 minutes at room temperature, depending on the strength of the rennet. Chill it afterwards if you like it cold, but only once it has set.
- The dressingCream, sugar and wine, poured over at table; a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira is the likeliest reading, though the recipe says only "wine." Add it only at serving; acid and alcohol stirred in early will interfere with the curd.
- YieldA quart of milk serves four to six as a light dessert.
Slip is an old name for what English cookbooks called junket: milk set with rennet, the same first step that begins every rennet cheese, but stopped and eaten before any draining or pressing. The name appears in English as well as American receipt books, so it is not exclusively Virginian. Rennet came from the fourth stomach of an unweaned calf, dried and steeped, so the dish suited households with access to a freshly killed calf. Its appeal depended on milk still warm from milking and needed no cooking at all, making it one of the quickest sweets in the repertoire, and such milk dishes were often recommended for invalids and children. Commercial rennet extract and junket tablets, available from the later nineteenth century onward, eventually replaced homemade wine of rennet and kept the dish alive well into the twentieth century.