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Dessert

Junket with Meringue

A custard-like dessert made from milk, sugar, salt, rennet, and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Junket with Meringue

Ingredients

Directions

Make the junket

  1. Heat the milk until warm, then stir in 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

  2. Add 1/4 teaspoon rennet and stir gently.

  3. Let it sit until set.

Top and finish

  1. Whip 2 egg whites until soft peaks form, then gradually add 1/4 cup sugar and continue whipping until stiff peaks form.

  2. Top the set junket with the meringue.

  3. Brown lightly under a broiler if desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the body of the dish, and rennet sets it into a soft custard-like curd.
Rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the milk proteins so the mixture sets into a soft curd.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam that provides the light, airy structure of the meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the junket and, dissolved into whipped whites, stabilizes the meringue.

The step that matters

Let the junket sit until set. Rennet needs time and undisturbed warmth to coagulate the milk. Stirring or moving the dish before it sets can break the forming curd, leaving it grainy or runny.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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