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Caramel Junket
Few grains salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Whipped cream, sweetened and flavored Chopped nut meats Heat milk until lukewarm. Caramelize sugar, add boiling water, and cook until syrup is reduced to one-third cup. Cool, and add milk slowly to syrup. Reduce junket tablet to powder, using a small mallet, add to mixture, with salt and vanilla. Turn into a glass dish, let stand in warm place until set, then chill. Cover with whipped cream and sprinkle with chopped nuts.
A rennet custard, set by enzyme rather than heat or gelatin. The quantities have been lost from the transcription, so the working proportions below come from the standard junket ratio of the period.
- The missing amountsThe verbatim text preserves only the salt, vanilla and garnishes. A junket of this type is normally 1 pint milk, 1/4 cup sugar for the caramel, and one junket (rennet) tablet; treat those as the working figures rather than as the book's own.
- Lukewarm means 98-110FLukewarm here means about blood heat, in the region of 100F -- This is the hinge of the whole dish. Rennet works best at around blood heat and is progressively inactivated by higher temperatures, so a mixture that is too hot will set poorly or not at all. Mix the caramel syrup into the milk only after the syrup has cooled, and check the temperature before adding the tablet.
- Milk that will not setUltra-pasteurized and UHT milk resist rennet coagulation because the severe heat treatment interferes with the way rennet acts on the milk proteins. Ordinary pasteurized whole milk sets reliably; skim milk gives a weak, watery curd.
- Junket tabletsThese are rennet tablets, still sold for cheesemaking and under the Junket brand name. Crush to a true powder and dissolve in a spoonful of cold water before adding, or the fragments will set the custard unevenly. Liquid rennet works too, at a few drops per pint.
- Do not stir or move itOnce the rennet is in you have a minute or two before coagulation begins. Pour into the serving dish immediately and leave it entirely undisturbed until firm, usually 10 to 15 minutes in a warm room. Jostling breaks the curd and it weeps.
- Caramelizing the sugarMelt the sugar dry in a heavy pan over medium heat until deep amber, then add the boiling water off the heat and at arm's length; it will spit violently. Return to the heat to dissolve any hardened lumps and reduce to one-third cup.
- Yield and servingA pint serves four in small glasses. Chill after it has set, not before, and add the whipped cream and nuts just before serving.
Junket was one of the oldest sweet dishes in the English repertoire, a milk pudding set with rennet from a calf's stomach and eaten soft and barely sweetened; the name is generally traced to a Norman French word for a rush basket in which fresh curds were drained. By the time Fannie Farmer's book went through its editions, the calf's stomach had been replaced by the commercial rennet tablet. The caramel and whipped cream mark it as a turn-of-the-century refinement of a very plain nursery food, and it needs no oven and no ice, only a warm room and then a cold larder.