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Caramel Junket
Required: One quart of milk, 6 tablespoonfuls of granulated sugar, I junket tablet and 1 tablespoonful of cold water. Put the sugar into a small pan, with just sufficient water to melt it, stir till the sugar is no longer visible, and cook (without stirring) until the syrup becomes a dark brown; then pour in a few tablespoonfuls of the milk, and allow it to cook until strongly flavored and sweetened by the caramel. Add this flavored milk to the remainder of the cold milk and the tablet dissolved in the water. Flavor with a few drops of vanilla extract, and serve in custard glasses.
A rennet custard that sets without eggs or heat, flavoured with burnt-sugar caramel. Everything depends on the temperature of the milk when the tablet goes in.
- The hinge: milk temperatureRennet sets milk best in a warm band, roughly 98-110F; it works only sluggishly in cold milk and is inactivated once the milk gets hot (from about 140F up). Adding the caramel milk to "cold milk" as written will give a slow, weak set at best; warm the whole quart to blood heat before stirring in the dissolved tablet, then leave it alone.
- Junket tablets"Junket" was the old name for this rennet-set dessert, later adopted as a brand name for rennet tablets. Rennet tablets are still sold for cheesemaking, but they are much stronger than dessert tablets — one will set several litres or more of milk, so you need only a fraction of one. Follow the strength on the packet rather than counting tablets.
- Do not disturb itPour into the glasses immediately after stirring, and do not move or jostle them for about ten minutes while the curd forms. Stirring a setting junket breaks the curd and you get thin, weeping milk that will not recover.
- Milk to useWhole pasteurized milk works. Ultra-pasteurized or UHT milk sets badly or not at all, and homogenization makes for a softer curd than the 1900s cook would have had.
- The caramelMelt the sugar with a spoonful or two of water over medium heat, and once it is clear stop stirring — agitation makes it crystallize. Take it to a deep amber and no further; past that it turns bitter. Adding cold milk to hot caramel will spit violently, so add it a spoonful at a time, off the heat.
- Cool the caramel milkThe caramel milk comes off the stove very hot. Here it is only a few tablespoonfuls going into a whole quart, so the mixture will cool at once; but if you warm the milk first, check that the blend is no more than blood heat before the tablet goes in.
- Chilling and yieldOnce set at room temperature, move the glasses to the refrigerator for an hour to firm and chill. A quart makes about six custard-glass servings.
Junket is one of the oldest sweets in the English repertoire: milk set with rennet, the same enzyme from a calf's stomach that starts cheese, but eaten young and soft rather than pressed. The name is usually traced to the Norman-French jonquette, a cream cheese drained on a rush mat. Its appeal is a matter of arithmetic: a quart of milk, six spoons of sugar and a tablet costing pennies fed a family a dessert with no eggs, no butter and no oven time, which mattered when eggs were expensive and coal was measured. Rennet tablets sold under the Junket name were a staple of American grocery shelves for decades, and the dessert has since faded from them.