Junket
2 tablespoons wine, or 1 teaspoon vanilla teaspoon salt Dissolve junket tablet in cold water. Heat the milk until lukewarm; add junket tablet, sugar, and flavoring; fill frappé glasses, let stand in warm room until set; then chill and serve.
A rennet custard, set by enzyme rather than by heat or eggs. Everything depends on the milk being warm enough for the rennet to work and cool enough not to destroy it.
- The hinge: milk temperature"Lukewarm" means about 110F, no hotter. Too hot and the rennet enzyme is inactivated and the junket never sets; too cool and it works slowly, so the mixture may take a long time to firm.
- Do not disturb itOnce the tablet goes in, stir only long enough to combine, pour immediately, and leave the glasses absolutely still until set, usually 10 to 15 minutes in a warm room. Jostling breaks the fragile curd and the dessert weeps whey.
- Junket tabletsThese are rennet tablets, still sold under the Junket name and in cheesemaking shops. Package strength varies; one tablet typically sets a pint to a quart of milk, so follow the current package proportions. Dissolve in a tablespoon of cold water first.
- Milk to avoidUltra-pasteurized and UHT milk will not set with rennet, and neither will most non-dairy milks. Use ordinary pasteurized whole milk; skim milk sets weakly and tastes thin.
- Frappé glassesSmall stemmed glasses of roughly 4 to 5 ounces. Custard cups, ramekins or espresso cups do the same job; shallow wide dishes set less neatly.
- The wineThe recipe allows two tablespoons of wine in place of the vanilla; it does not say which wine. Add it with the sugar and tablet as directed, and pour at once.
- Chilling and yieldChilling -- Chill only after the junket is fully set, then serve within a few hours; it slackens on standing.
Junket is one of the oldest sweet uses of rennet, the calf-stomach enzyme that curdles milk for cheese. English cookery had rennet-set milk puddings for centuries, and by the late nineteenth century American households bought the enzyme in convenient tablet form from Christian Hansen's laboratory, whose Junket brand took its name from the dish itself. Cookbooks of the era are often said to have recommended it for invalids and children, since it delivers milk in a soft, barely altered state that was thought easy to digest. Its appearance here is typical of the genre: books like this one collected the full range of a household's sweet courses, not only those calling for the sponsor's product.