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Dessert

Junket

A sweet cheese dessert made by thickening milk with rennet, sugar, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Junket

Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Junket

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Warm the milk slightly.

  2. Slowly add the rennet wine and stir until well mixed.

  3. Let the mixture stand until it thickens.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

  2. Milk + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

  3. Wine + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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 dessert, which thickens into a soft curd as the rennet works.
Rennet wine
Contains rennet, an enzyme that causes the milk to set into a soft, spoonable curd.

The step that matters

Adding the rennet wine. Rennet sets milk best when it is only slightly warm and is stirred in evenly. Hot milk can weaken or destroy the enzyme, and uneven mixing leaves lumps or patches that do not set.

“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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