Junket (dessert)

Junket

A Jasmine tea Junket
Type	Pudding
Main ingredients	Sweetened milk, rennet, sugar, vanilla
Cookbook: Junket  Media: Junket

Junket is a milk-based dessert, made with sweetened milk and rennet, the digestive enzyme which curdles milk.

To make junket, milk (usually with sugar and vanilla added) is heated to approximately body temperature and the rennet, which has been dissolved in water, is mixed in to cause the milk to set. The dessert is chilled prior to serving. Junket is often served with a sprinkling of grated nutmeg on top. For most of the 20th century in the eastern United States, junket was often a preferred food for ill children, mostly due to its sweetness and ease of digestion.

The same was true in the United Kingdom where, in medieval times, junket had been a food of the nobility made with cream, not milk, and flavoured with rosewater and spices as well as sugar. It started to fall from favour during the Tudor era, being replaced by syllabubs on fashionable banqueting tables and, by the 18th century, had become an everyday food sold in the streets. In the United States, junket is commonly made with a packaged mix of rennet and sweetener from a company eponymously known as Junket.

Dorothy Hartley, in her "Food in England", has a section on rennett followed by a section on 'Junkets, Curds and Whey or Creams'. She cites rum as the commonest flavouring, and clotted cream as the 'usual accompaniment'. She notes that the practice of heating the milk to blood heat is new one; originally, junket was made with milk as it was obtained from the cow, already at blood heat.^[1]

The word's etymology is uncertain. It may be related to the Norman jonquette (a kind of cream made with boiled milk, egg yolks, sugar and caramel), or to the Italian giuncata or directly to the medieval Latin juncata. The first recorded use in this sense is in "The boke of nurture, folowyng Englondis gise".^[2]

Elizabeth David, in an article in Nova, dated October 1965, asserts that the word "junket" derives from the French jonches, a name for freshly made milk cheese drained in a rush basket." The article can be found in the collection An Omelette and a Glass of Wine originally published in London by R. Hale Ltd, 1984. See the chapter titled "Pleasing Cheeses," Page 206.

Brand ownership and manufacture in the United States

Junket brand rennet custard mix was popular in the United States in the 1960s. Today, it is one of many "legacy" brands still in production, in this case, where there is no true competitor making rennet custard. The brand is owned and made by Redco Foods of Little Falls, New York, a company more famous for its tea products under its other "legacy" brands Red Rose and Salada, all owned by Dusseldorf, Germany-based Teekanne, GmbH, inventor of the flow-through teabag.

References

1. Dorothy Hartley, Food In England, 1954; 1999, page p.473
2. John Russell, The boke of nurture, folowyng Englondis gise, c.1460,Project Gutenburg