There is nothing I like better than custard. In summer, this lovely dessert makes way for icecream (preferably flavored with only vanilla), frozen yoghurt and sorbet that's based on Quark -a German specialty already discussed by Roman historians who generally agreed that it was nothing like cheese.
In Natural History (AD 77-79), Pliny the Elder wondered how the 'barbarians', who had sustained themselves on milk for centuries, ignored or were not interested in cheese-making although they did use buttermilk and 'the butter-rich foam of milk, which is more dense than rennet'. [mirum barbaras gentes, quae lacte vivant, ignorare aut spernere tot saeculis casei dotem, densantes id alioqui in acorem iucundum et pingue butyrum. spuma id est, lacte concretior lentiorque quam quod serum vocatur. non omittendum in eo olei vim esse et barbaros omnes infantesque nostros ita ungui. Plin. Nat. 11.96]
Tacitus was less harsh on the Germanic peoples, whose diet was based on plain stuff like wild berries, venison, and 'co-agulated' milk. [Cibi simplices, agrestia poma, recens fera aut lac concretum: sine apparatu, sine blandimentis expellunt famem. Tac. Ger. 23] In fact, Germania (AD 98) was composed in praise of the foreign simplicity as opposed to Roman extravagance.
Julius Caesar identified cheese among the basic three foods eaten by Germans -the other two being milk and meat. [Agriculturae non student, maiorque pars eorum victus in lacte, caseo, carne consistit. Caes. Gal. 6.22.1] Perhaps there were already several types of Quark or he just didn't care enough to make the distinction in his Commentaries on the Gallic War (59-48 BC).
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| Spring frost by Elioth Gruner (1919) |
Quark is the number one cheese in German desserts. It results from curdling soured milk or buttermilk and comes in three versions: skimmed (0%-10% fat), regular (20% fat) and Sahnequark with added cream (40% fat).
Curdled milk, possibly enhanced with rennet, was also the basis for junket -a favorite dessert of medieval nobility. Unlike posset, caudle, and syllabub which gradually took over in Renaissance & Early Modern cuisines, junket was not a beverage. It was categorized as pudding. The earliest reference for junket is found in The Boke of Nurture (c. 1460). This was a comprehensive guide on eating, drinking, cooking, serving, and living well. Junket is referenced in a chapter dealing with menus, in the section about dessert. "Do not have cream, strawberries or junket (Ioncate) late in the evening unless they are served with hard cheese, which is good for the stomach," advised John Russell. Junket was eaten cold, which makes it perhaps the forerunner of 'cream-ice' that was introduced to Western Europe through Italy a hundred years later.
Today junket is made either by thickening milk with rennet or directly from a box that contains 'junket mix' in powder form. Rennet tablets became very popular in the U.S. during the second half of the nineteenth century so Americans remember their grandmother's junket puddings with lots of nostalgia. A detailed method for preparing junket was also recorded in Miss Leslie's new cookery book (1857).
Rennet has been extracted from the stomach of calves or from plants like artichokes but in the past 50 years or so it's been artificially made in a lab. The co-agulated milk (lac concretum) recorded by Pliny the Elder and Tacitus was not made with rennet since unpasteurized milk contained lots of healthy bacteria that already ensured fermentation. To make up for this, Quark recipes today use mesophilic culture or/and rennet in liquid form.
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