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Cocoanut Junket
4 tablespoons shredded cocoanut 1 junket tablet 1 quart milk 2 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon cold water 2 teaspoons vanilla Mix the cocoanut and milk and let them stand in a warm oven for half an hour. Add sugar; strain when dissolved, and add the tablet dissolved in the cold water. Add the flavoring; pour the junket into glasses and let stand in a warm place, until firm. Remove to cool place, and at serving time sprinkle with sugar and cocoanut. Serve with or withont cream.
Junket is milk set with rennet rather than gelatin or egg, and the whole dish turns on holding the milk in a narrow temperature band. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: milk temperatureRennet works best at about blood heat, roughly 98-105F, and is progressively inactivated at higher temperatures. The milk must be lukewarm — blood heat, not hot — when the dissolved tablet goes in. Milk still hot from scalding will not set, and cold milk sets slowly or not at all.
- "A warm oven"Here this seems to mean barely warm: a cooling oven, or the pilot light only with the door ajar. It is a gentle infusion step to draw coconut flavour into the milk, not a baking step. A modern oven on its lowest setting will overshoot badly; a saucepan over very low heat with a thermometer is more reliable.
- Junket tabletsThese are rennet tablets, still sold for cheesemaking and for junket itself. Dosage varies by brand, so check the packet rather than trusting the 1900s dose. Vegetarian microbial rennet works the same way. Liquid rennet is also sold; follow the drops-per-quart on the bottle.
- Do not stir once setPour into glasses immediately after adding the tablet and leave them absolutely still. Moving or stirring the milk while the curd is forming breaks it and you get a grainy, weeping dessert instead of a smooth one.
- Setting and chillingTen to fifteen minutes in a warm room is usually enough. Only refrigerate after it has set firm — chilling too early stalls the enzyme. Best eaten the day it is made.
- The coconutThe recipe strains the infused coconut out and reserves fresh coconut for the top. Use unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut; modern sweetened flake will make the finished dish cloying given the added sugar.
- VanillaTwo teaspoons in a quart is generous by current standards. Add it with the sugar, before the tablet, so the mixture is not disturbed later.
- YieldA quart of milk fills six small glasses or four generous ones.
Junket was one of the standard invalid and nursery dishes of the English-speaking kitchen: milk clotted with rennet, the same enzyme that starts cheese, but eaten at the tender curd stage with sugar and flavouring. The word is generally traced through Middle English to a term for a rush basket, the kind in which fresh curds were once drained. Its ubiquity in early twentieth-century American cookbooks owes a great deal to the commercial rennet tablet, sold widely under the Junket brand, which turned a farmhouse operation into something a cook could do with a quart of bought milk and no calf's stomach on hand. Coconut here is a small piece of period luxury and and widely available, and cooks used it to dress up plain milk puddings, which is exactly what is happening in this recipe.</br>