rennet
Definitions
Agriculture
- noun an extract from the stomach of a calf; it contains the enzyme rennin, which clots milk. It is used in the production of certain milk products such as cheese.
Food
- A mixture of enzymes extracted from the stomachs of suckling animals such as calves, kids and lambs, but usually from the fourth stomach of the unweaned calf. Is is used to curdle milk as the first stage in cheese making. vegetarian rennets are now made using microorganisms. Some extracts of plants, especially cardoon, are used for the same purpose.
Travel
- noun a substance made from the lining of calves’s stomachs that is used in cheese making
Origin & History of “rennet”
Rennet probably goes
back to an unrecorded Old
English *
rynet.
this appears to
have been derived
from the
verb run,
which was used dialectally into the 20th
century for ‘curdle’. The underlying notion is of the
solid parts of milk ‘running’
together and coagulating.
