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Junket Ice Cream with Peaches
4 cups lukewarm milk 1 cup heavy cream 1¼ cups sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt 1½ Junket Tablets 1 tablespoon cold water 1 tablespoon vanilla 1 teaspoon almond extract
An ingredient list from the era when rennet tablets were a staple of the dessert cupboard. The method is only implied, and the temperature of the milk is the whole game.
- Junket tablets are rennetThey are still sold under the Junket name and by cheesemaking suppliers. Dose varies by brand and by whether the tablets are sold for dessert or for cheesemaking, so follow the package; this recipe's own ratio is 1½ tablets to a quart of milk. Liquid vegetable or animal rennet works too, but again follow the bottle rather than converting tablet-for-tablet.
- "Lukewarm" means 100-105F"Lukewarm" means roughly body temperature up to about 110F, the range the tablet packages specified -- and it is the hinge. Much cooler and the milk sets slowly or not at all; much hotter and the set is weak or fails (the enzyme itself is not destroyed until considerably higher, around 140F). Use a thermometer rather than a fingertip.
- Dissolve the tablet in the cold water firstThe tablespoon of cold water in the list exists only to crush and dissolve the tablet. Add it to the sweetened milk, stir just a few seconds, then leave the mixture absolutely still until set, about ten minutes. Stirring a setting curd breaks it and the mixture will separate.
- Where the peaches goThe title promises peaches but the list omits them. The obvious options are to add about a cup of peeled, mashed and sugared peaches after the junket has set and been broken up, or to fold sliced fruit in during the last minutes of freezing. Fruit acid added before setting will interfere with the rennet set.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-cranked bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt in a 3:1 ratio. A modern ice cream machine handles it directly; chill the set mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator first, since a junket base goes into the freezer warm otherwise and churns badly.
- Cream and sugarHeavy cream then and now is much the same, around 36 percent fat. The sugar reads high to modern taste, but with only one cup of cream against four of milk it is doing structural work, keeping the ice crystals small. Cutting it much below a cup makes a hard, icy result.
- Almond extractA teaspoon alongside a tablespoon of vanilla is assertive by current standards. Half that is closer to modern palates, particularly with peaches, which have their own almond note in the stone.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half of finished ice cream, serving eight to ten. Best eaten the day it is made; a rennet-set base can turn grainy after a night in a home freezer.
Junket is one of the oldest desserts in English cookery, a dish of milk set soft with rennet, and the name is generally traced to the Norman jonquette, a rush basket in which curds were once drained. What made it a fixture of American kitchens around 1900 was the tablet: standardised rennet extract, sold by the box at the grocer's, which turned a farmhouse guess into a reliable measurement. Cookbooks of Fannie Farmer's school leaned on such tablets, which let a cook build a frozen dessert on four cups of milk and only one of cream, a real economy when cream was dear and ice cream was still an occasion. The rennet also gives the frozen mixture body without eggs or a cooked custard.