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Dessert

Devonshire Junket

A chilled milk dessert set with rennet, flavored with cream, sugar, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 junket

  1. Pour warm milk into a bowl.

  2. Add rennet and stir gently.

Top and serve

  1. Top with scalded cream, sugar, and cinnamon without breaking the curd.

  2. Let it sit until set, then serve in glasses.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Warm milk is the base that rennet turns into a soft, spoonable set.
Rennet
An enzyme that coagulates the milk proteins into a delicate curd.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving a smoother mouthfeel to the top layer.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the mild, slightly savory flavor of the milk curd.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and flavor to the cream topping.

The step that matters

Top with cream without breaking the curd. Rennet sets the milk into a fragile protein gel. Pouring or stirring hard breaks that gel apart into watery whey, so the cream, sugar and cinnamon should be spooned on gently and the bowl left undisturbed while it sets.

“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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