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Dessert

Devonshire Junket

A chilled milk dessert flavored with rum or brandy, sugar, and nutmeg, set with rennet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rum and nutmeg work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 646 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Devonshire Junket

Ingredients

Directions

Warm and combine

  1. Heat the milk until just warm.

  2. Add the rum or brandy and sugar to the warm milk.

  3. Pour the mixture into a serving dish.

  4. Stir in the essence of rennet until well mixed.

Set and serve

  1. Grate nutmeg on top.

  2. Place the junket in a cool place.

  3. If available, spread clotted cream over the junket and sprinkle with castor sugar.

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. Rum + nutmegtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together646 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Milk + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together967 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  3. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

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

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. 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

New milk
Forms the body of the junket, which sets into a soft curd once rennet is added.
Essence of rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the milk proteins, turning the liquid into a delicate set curd.
Lump sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild, savoury flavour of the milk.
Rum or brandy
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the milk base.

The step that matters

Heat the milk only until just warm. Rennet is an enzyme, and very hot milk can weaken or destroy it. Milk that is only just warm lets rennet set the milk into a soft curd instead of leaving it runny.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, rum):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, rum. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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