[Sca-cooks] Junket

[Kathleen Madsen]

Junket is what you get when you turn milk into curds. 
It is a really soft, moist curd and is set at a lower
temperature and is kept pretty much intact.  A general
rule of thumb is the higher the heat and smaller the
curd the harder it is.  Brie, a very soft cheese,
keeps the curd in large uncut slices, Parmesean, a
very hard cheese, cuts them to about corn kernel size.

In some grocery stores you can find "junket tablets"
which are just a weaker form of rennet.  They're
usually somewhere around the canning supplies.

The reed mats were used for drainage to dry the curd
out enough to handle for serving.  My recommendation
is to use a couple of sushi mats with a layer of
cheesecloth (the real stuff), linen or muslin between
the junket and the mat.  This is a *really* fresh
cheese and won't last more than a couple of days.  As
Adamantius said I'd make this the morning of the event
for an evening serving.  If you're the Vittoria I
think you are ;) and will be at Spring Collegium in
Teufelberg I'd be happy to go over it in person with
you.  Most anyone can point you in the direction of
the "cheese lady".

Eibhlin

Also sprach Ariane Helou:
>It sounds a little like cottage cheese to me.

Junket is softer, and less distinctively curdy, than
cottage cheese. 
More like milk-based Jello or the softest varieties of
Japanese tofu 
in consistency. The primary difference is that junket
is made to be 
eaten in less than, say, 12 hours after adding the
rennet, and so 
drainage isn't really encouraged in any extreme way.
So, the curds 
are left to drain, but are otherwise left pretty much
undisturbed, 
and it doesn't really have a lot of little, broken
curds. Ideally, 
it's one big, soft curd.

>  I'm not sure what "put it between reeds" means --
pressing it, I 
>suppose?  Which would mean it's much more solid than
cottage cheese 
>-- maybe more like farmer's cheese or something.  The
alternate 
>instructions to put it in cold water make me think
that the curds 
>can either be pressed and served later, or kept cool
and served 
>fresh the same day.

Junket, it has been alleged by some, is named for the
woven 
broomflower (jonquil) stem basket traditionally
associated with 
draining the stuff. Putting it between reeds suggests,
to me, that it 
goes on top of a row or mat of reeds laid out to allow
drainage, then 
covered with more reeds to protect it from drying,
bugs and dust. I 
don't think it's pressed, except perhaps by gravity.
The instruction 
to put it in cold water suggests that the goal is to
keep it firm, 
but also moist, and above all, to keep it from
souring.

>Since the meal I'm planning this for is at a camping
event, I'd need 
>to make the junket anywhere from a week to a day in
advance, so the 
>pressed version seems more appropriate.  On the other
hand, if it's 
>going to be very time-consuming or difficult, perhaps
I ought to 
>just buy more cheeses and devote my energies to the
more substantial 
>and central parts of the meal... which brings me back
to the 
>question of what a finished junket looks like,
anyway. :-)

I'd try making a batch, maybe according to a modern
recipe (you can 
even buy commercial junket tablets, which supply a
weaker form of 
rennet than that used for cheeses), just to become
familiar with the 
process before you decide what to do in the end. Me,
I'd just make it 
at the event, in the morning, and serve it in the
evening.

Adamantius