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Junket Eggnog
1 egg yolk 2 teaspoons sugar 1/4 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup milk 1 egg white, beaten slightly 1/4 junket tablet 1 teaspoon cold water Separate the white from the yolk of the egg; add the sugar and vanilla to the yolk, then blend with the white. Have the milk lukewarm, add the egg mixture to it and immediately stir in the junket, dissolved in a teaspoon of cold water. Pour at once into small glasses and grate a little nutmeg or cinnamon over the top. As soon as set, put on ice to chill.
This is a rennet custard rather than a cooked one: nothing in it is ever heated past blood warmth, and both parts of the egg go in raw. That is exactly why it cannot be recommended now, least of all for the reader it was written for.
- The egg is never cookedBoth yolk and white are stirred into lukewarm milk and left to set by enzyme action alone. Nothing reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella; the finished glass is as raw as the egg that went into it.
- Lukewarm milk is an incubatorRennet sets milk at roughly body temperature, and the mixture then stands at that warmth until firm before it goes on ice. That holding period sits squarely in the range where bacteria multiply fastest.
- The intended eater is the wrong eaterJunket eggnogs of this kind were characteristically served to the sick, the elderly and the convalescent. Those are precisely the people for whom a raw-egg dish carries the greatest risk of serious illness.
- Junket tabletsA junket tablet is compressed rennet, the milk-clotting enzyme used in cheesemaking, sold in the period for home desserts. It has no preservative effect whatever and does nothing to make the raw egg safe.
- Why not simply cook itMilk that has been scalded or boiled sets slowly and weakly with rennet, so heating the milk first does not straightforwardly rescue the dish. If you want an eggnog-style custard, use a current recipe built on a cooked base or pasteurised eggs.
"Invalid cookery" was a standard department of household manuals well into the twentieth century, when nursing happened at home and the cook was expected to produce food a feverish or convalescent patient could swallow: beef tea, gruels, milk toast, wine whey and junkets. Junket itself is an old English name for a rennet-set milk pudding, and the word came to attach in America to the branded tablets of rennet extract sold for making it at home. Rennet custards were prized for invalids on the reasoning, common in the period, that milk already curdled by the enzyme was gentler on a weak digestion than plain milk, and eggnog added nourishment in the form that was then most admired -- raw egg beaten into liquid. The whole category rests on a nutritional confidence that predates any general understanding of egg-borne infection, and it is a good measure of how far kitchen practice has moved.