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Custard Junket

A custard made by mixing milk, egg, sugar, salt, vanilla or nutmeg, and liquid rennet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Custard Junket

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Beat the egg and mix in the sugar and salt.

  2. Heat the milk and then add it to the egg mixture.

  3. Strain the mixture, add flavoring, and cool until lukewarm.

Set the junket

  1. Add the dissolved rennet and mix well.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Provides the proteins that the rennet sets into a soft, tender curd.
Egg
Adds richness and a smoother, more custard-like texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild flavor of the milk.
Liquid rennet
An enzyme that makes the milk coagulate into a soft, set custard.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture to lukewarm before adding the rennet. Rennet is an enzyme, and high heat destroys it, so the mixture must be lukewarm, not hot, when the dissolved rennet goes in. If it is too hot, the milk may fail to set into a soft curd.

“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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