Junket
In 1 tablespoonful of cold water break up and dissolve I junket or rennet tablet. Take I measured quart of milk, put 2 tablespoonfuls of it and 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar in a saucepan.
Stir over the fire until the sugar is dissolved then add all of the milk and heat until blood warm, then take off quickly. Add 1 teaspoonful of vanilla or other flavoring and the dissolved tablet and pour quickly into cups or a dessert dish.
Let stand undisturbed on the kitchen table until it jellies, which will take about ten minutes; then set carefully away to chill. Serve very cold with cream and sugar.
Junket is a rennet-set milk pudding, and it lives or dies by one number: the milk must be barely warm, never hot. Everything else is straightforward.
- "Blood warm" means 98-105FUse a thermometer. Rennet works fastest around body temperature and the enzyme is destroyed above roughly 140F, so milk that feels genuinely hot will never set. Coming off the heat too late is the single most common failure.
- The milk matters more than anythingUltra-pasteurized and UHT milk generally will not set properly with rennet: the high heat treatment denatures whey proteins, which then bind to the casein and block rennet coagulation. Use ordinary pasteurized whole milk. Skim milk sets but gives a weak, watery curd.
- Rennet tabletsJunket-brand rennet tablets are still sold, one tablet per quart of milk as written. If you only have liquid animal or vegetable rennet, follow the dose on that bottle for a quart of milk; dessert rennet is weaker than cheesemaking rennet, so do not measure by eye.
- Do not disturb itPour into the serving cups immediately after stirring in the rennet, then leave them completely still. Moving or stirring the milk while it sets breaks the curd and you get whey pooling at the edges. Ten minutes on the counter is right; the book's instruction to chill only after setting is deliberate.
- SugarTwo tablespoons to a quart is barely sweet by modern taste. Dissolving it in a little warm milk first, as directed, prevents grittiness; a much heavier hand with sugar will slow the set.
- YieldA quart makes four generous or six small cups. It is best eaten the day it is made, as it slowly weeps whey in the refrigerator.
- Raw milkA cook in this book's era might well have used unpasteurized milk, and at these temperatures nothing is being sterilized. Make it with pasteurized milk only.
Rennet puddings are old European household cookery — the English "junket" is generally traced to the rush basket (Norman French jonquette) in which fresh curds were once drained, and the word came to mean both the curd and, by extension, a feast. What made it a fixture of American cookbooks was industrial convenience: rennet was sold as a small compressed tablet under the Junket name, so a dessert that had once required calf stomach or a dairy's supply of extract needed only a quart of milk and a tablet from the grocer. Milk, sugar, flavoring and a penny tablet made a dish that was filling, needed no eggs, no oven and almost no fuel, and was often recommended for invalids and children on the grounds that rennet had already begun the work of digesting the milk.