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Junket With Canned Fruit
For each quart of measured milk allow 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar, flavoring to taste and I junket tablet. Drain and cut fine some canned fruitor such fresh fruits as oranges or bananas-and partly fill one large dish or the necessary number of small ones. Break the tablet and dissolve in 1 tablespoonful of cold water. In a saucepan put the sugar and ½ cupful of milk and stand on the stove and stir until the sugar is entirely dissolved. Add the rest of the milk, stir and heat until lukewarm then take off. Add the flavoring and dissolved tablet, stir once quickly then pour into the dishes. Let stand on kitchen table until the milk is set then set away. Serve very cold with cream.
A rennet custard, set by enzyme rather than by egg or heat. Everything depends on temperature and on not disturbing the mixture once the tablet goes in.
- Lukewarm means 110FLukewarm means about 110F -- Rennet works best around 100-110F and is inactivated at higher temperatures, roughly above 140F. Milk much hotter than blood heat will set poorly or not at all. A thermometer is the surest guide; take the pan off at about 110F.
- One stir, then leave it aloneThis is the hinge of the recipe. Rennet begins to act at once and the curd forms within a few minutes; stirring after the tablet is in shears the curd and you get grainy, weeping milk instead of a smooth set. Pour immediately and do not move the dishes for 10 to 15 minutes.
- Junket tabletsStill sold as rennet tablets, in cheesemaking supply shops and some supermarket baking aisles. Vegetable or microbial rennet works, though it may set a little softer. One tablet per quart is right; do not double it hoping for a firmer result.
- Milk mattersUse ordinary pasteurized whole milk. Ultra-pasteurized and UHT milk generally will not set with rennet, because the heat treatment changes how the milk proteins behave, and skim milk gives a weak, watery curd.
- Chill only after setting"Let stand on kitchen table until the milk is set then set away" is deliberate: refrigerating too early stops the enzyme before the curd forms. Once firm, chill at least two hours, then serve cold.
- Fruit to avoidCanned fruit, oranges and bananas are safe choices. Fresh pineapple, papaya, kiwi and figs carry proteases that break down the set curd, and very acidic fruit juice pooling in the dish can curdle the milk unevenly. Drain canned fruit well.
- FlavoringA teaspoon of vanilla per quart is a reasonable reading; almond extract or a little grated nutmeg are other possibilities. Add it before the tablet, as the recipe says, so no extra stirring is needed afterward.
- YieldA quart of milk fills roughly four to six small dishes, or one 1-quart serving bowl; the recipe leaves the number open.
Junket is a long-established sweet dish in English cookery, made by setting warm milk with rennet, the calf-stomach extract that also curdles milk for cheese. The name is generally traced to medieval words for a rush basket -- the usual English derivation runs through Old French jonquette or jonchee -- the basket in which fresh curds were drained, so that the container eventually gave its name to the food. Household cooks once made their own rennet by steeping a piece of dried calf's stomach, but by the late nineteenth century standardized rennet tablets were sold commercially, which is why this recipe can call for "1 junket tablet" and expect the reader to know what is meant. Its appeal is easy to explain: a quart of milk, three spoonfuls of sugar and a tablet stretch a tin of fruit into a dessert, with no eggs, no oven and no fuel beyond the few minutes it takes to warm the milk.