junket
/ˈdʒʌŋkɪt
/- Sometimes the curds and whey were separated and the curds mixed with conventional junket curds, breadcrumbs, and honey to make an ‘eating posset’ that was thick enough to slice.
- In addition, as an ingredient in junket, it helps coagulate cheese as well and is considered a thickening agent for many other foods.
- But the worst thing, by far the worst thing I have ever tasted was junket.
- A couple of weeks ago, I was one of many online writers to be invited to be part of the first online movie junket.
- The cost of Adrienne's wild west junket was $60,000, which no doubt went a long way towards assuaging all that Western alienation you hear so much about.
- I'm happy to say that my over-extended press junket is FINISHED!
- Mr Hale was suspended by the council in April 1997 in the light of a damning district auditor's report on junketing and expenses abuse which prompted the beginning of a huge police inquiry into wrongdoing.
- Amid the initial focus on junketing and the abuse of expenses, it was one of the first indications of how far the cancer of corruption had spread.
- We want it to be about run of the mill people - not junketing.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French jonquette 'rush basket', from jonc 'rush', from Latin juncus. Originally denoting a rush basket, especially one for fish (remaining in dialect use), the term also denoted a cream cheese, formerly made in a rush basket or served on a rush mat. A later extended sense, 'feast, merrymaking', gave rise to sense 2 of the noun.
Today a junket is a dish of sweetened curds. Originally, though, it was a rush basket, and the word goes back to Latin juncus ‘a rush’. In early translations of the Bible it was the word used for the little boat of bulrushes in which the infant Moses was placed by his mother. It came to mean ‘cream cheese’ or ‘dish of sweetened curds’, because they were at one time drained in a rush basket. Junkets might be served at a feast, and by the 16th century the sense ‘a feast, a party’ arose, from which came, in the early 19th century, ‘a pleasure trip’. The meaning ‘a trip or excursion made by government officials and paid for by public funds’ developed more recently.