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Dessert

Devonshire Junket

A dessert made from curds of warm milk, sweetened and topped with thick cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Devonshire Junket

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Combine warm milk and rennet-liquor in a bowl.

  2. Keep the mixture in a warm place until the whey separates and looks clear.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the curds and whey.

  2. Sweeten the curds to taste and pour thick cream over them.

  3. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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
Its proteins set into the soft curd that forms the body of the dish.
Rennet-liquor
Enzyme that coagulates the milk, setting it into a soft curd and separating whey.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty layer over the curds.
Sugar
Sweetens the curds to the cook's taste.

The step that matters

Keep the mixture in a warm place until the whey separates. Rennet works best at mild warmth. Too cold and the milk sets slowly or incompletely; too hot and the enzyme can be weakened or the curd can toughen, so the set may fail.

“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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