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Dessert

Junket Custards

A layered custard made with junket tablets, milk, sugar, and optional chocolate, flavoring, and coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Junket Custards

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base custard

  1. Soak the junket tablet in 1 tablespoon of cold milk until dissolved.

  2. Warm 1 quart of milk and sweeten, flavor, and color it if desired.

  3. Add the dissolved junket tablet to the warm milk and stir well.

  4. Pour the mixture into a glass dish and set it aside in a cool place until it sets.

Make the layers

  1. For chocolate custard, warm 1½ cups of milk, add 2 tablespoons of melted chocolate and 1 tablespoon of sugar.

  2. Dissolve another junket tablet in cold milk, stir it into the chocolate mixture, and pour into a glass dish.

  3. For pink custard, color 1½ cups of milk pink, warm it, and add a dissolved junket tablet, then pour over the chocolate custard.

  4. Flavor and sweeten the remaining 1½ cups of milk, add a dissolved junket tablet, and pour over the pink custard to create three layers.

Serve

  1. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Chocolate + creamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

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

  3. Junket + sugartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together82 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Junket + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the body of the custard and sets into a soft, tender gel.
Junket tablet
Rennet enzyme that coagulates the warm milk into a set custard.
Melted chocolate
Adds flavor and color to the chocolate layer.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard to taste.

The step that matters

Add the dissolved junket tablet to the warm milk and stir well. Rennet works best when evenly dispersed, so the milk coagulates uniformly. Lumps of undissolved tablet can leave weak or patchy spots, and the milk must stay warm but not hot, since excessive heat can inactivate the enzyme.

“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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