junket [LME] 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’ [L19th]developed in America.