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Junket Custard

A custard made with egg yolks, sugar, salt, rennet, milk, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,685 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Junket Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat the milk until lukewarm.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with sugar and salt.

Set the custard

  1. Strain the heated milk into the egg mixture, stir well, and add nutmeg to taste.

  2. When the mixture is lukewarm, stir in the dissolved rennet.

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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 base that the rennet coagulates into a soft, delicate curd.
Rennet
Enzyme that causes the milk to set into a curd, giving the custard its texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness, fat and a golden color to the custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savory notes of the salt.

The step that matters

Stirring in the rennet at lukewarm temperature. Rennet is an enzyme that works best at lukewarm temperatures. If the mixture is too hot, the enzyme is destroyed and the custard will not set; if it is too cold, setting becomes slow or incomplete.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk. 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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