JUNKET IS NICE by Dorothy Kunhardt — reviewed by Thomas

Children are unable to disagree with the statement ‘Junket is nice’ because they have no idea what junket is, they have never come across junket and have never even heard of junket so, to them, on hearing the statement ‘Junket is nice’, junket is necessarily synonymous with nice. I have no wish to disabuse them, in fact I have no basis on which to disabuse them, as I am, really, no more familiar with junket than they are, although I am perhaps more familiar than they are with its reputation, as a food for invalids, primarily, made of milk curdled with rennet, basically, neither of which pieces of knowledge encourage me to think at all favourably of junket. Actually, I would like to disabuse these children, whoever they are. I have never eaten junket but I do not think that it is nice. The red-bearded old man in red slippers in Dorothy Kunhardt’s 1933 pro-junket propaganda picture book Junket Is Nice is eating junket from a large red bowl. I suppose junket could be a suitable food for old men with few teeth, even if they are not invalids, though I am myself not old enough and have still too many teeth to know this, not that I would eat junket anyway, even if I knew this to be so. If everyone in the whole world comes to watch a bearded old man eating junket because of the size of the bowl of junket that the bearded old man is eating from and because of the correspondingly large amount of junket that he is eating from this large bowl, it is hard to imagine the implausibly large amount of junket that would draw such a crowd and hard to imagine what kind of old man this could be, to impress the whole world with such mundane feats of unilateral consumption. Presumably not an invalid, though we learn nothing of the state of his teeth. As the old man can speak to everyone in the whole world at once, he must either have a very loud voice, access to social media barely imaginable in 1933, or some other way of speaking inside every person’s head. Somehow I suspect the latter. Such omnipotence does he have that he can offer every person in the world something nice if they can guess what he is thinking about. This may seem hard, prima facie, but he gives some clues to make it easier. He describes several ludicrous things that he claims not to be thinking about, though how he can describe them without thinking about them is not presented as problematic. I find this very problematic. This is not something that I can do. The people of the world then suggest many ludicrous things that the red-bearded old man might be thinking about, any of which should trap him into thinking about them, but he tells them they are WRONG! He must be lying, I tell myself. He must be lying, or his idea of thinking is somehow different from mine. If the red-bearded old man’s thinking is limited to such things that are in fact the case and not ludicrous things, the red-bearded old man is the God of the Actual, which, it seems to me, is a terrible limitation upon him, despite whatever capricious omnipotence comes with the position. Does not a mind long for more than that? The gods are never free, it seems: they can have no imagination. A little boy on a tricycle knows that the red-bearded old man has no inside to his mind and therefore must be actually thinking of junket. RIGHT! says the red-bearded old man, and suddenly the last spoonful of junket is gone. What is this junket if it lasts only as long as our uncertainty? The little boy’s reward for guessing what the old man was thinking is to be allowed to lick the bowl from which the old man has been eating. Although presented in the book as something nice, this is surely one of the most disgusting moments in children’s literature, Especially as the little boy seems to like it. Especially as this is junket, which I do not believe is nice, not just due to its association with invalids. This moment is so disgusting that I close the book, cease my pointless metaphysical speculations, and never read about how the little boy gives the red-bearded old man a lift home on his tricycle so that he won’t be late for his supper.