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Tutti-Frutti Ice Cream
Add to one pound of pulverized sugar two quarts of pure rich cream; beat four eggs very light and add to the above, after mixing well; put the whole on the fire and stir constantly until it begins to boil; remove from fire and stir two minutes; season with vanilla; put into a freezer and when about half frozen, add to it one pound of preserved fruits (in equal parts cut in small pieces), cherries, peaches, pineapples, apricots, etc. Mix well with the cream and freeze.
A straightforward cooked custard base with candied fruit folded in partway through churning. The two things that decide whether it works are the temperature of the custard and how cold everything is when it goes into the machine.
- Do not let it boil"Stir constantly until it begins to boil" is optimistic advice for a four-egg custard. Cook over medium-low heat to 170-175F, when it coats the back of a spoon; past about 185F the eggs scramble. Straining it as it comes off the heat is cheap insurance.
- Pulverized sugarA fine-ground sugar, roughly what we would now call superfine (caster); nineteenth-century usage of 'powdered', 'pulverized' and 'confectioners'' was not consistent between sources. Regular granulated dissolves perfectly well in a hot custard. One pound is about 2 1/4 cups.
- Chill before churningThe original assumes the custard sits until cold, since it would have been carried to an ice-packed freezer. Refrigerate it at least four hours, preferably overnight; a warm base churns to a coarse, icy texture no matter how good the machine.
- The freezerA hand-crank bucket packed with ice and rock salt; the recommended proportion varies widely between sources, from about one part salt to three parts ice up to one to eight. In a modern compressor or frozen-bowl machine, "half frozen" means the point at which the mixture holds a soft ribbon, usually 15-20 minutes in.
- Preserved fruitsNot fresh fruit and not modern glacé mixed peel. The period intent is fruit put up in heavy syrup or candied whole — cherries, apricots, pineapple, peaches — drained well and diced small. Excess syrup will slow freezing and make the finished cream soft.
- ScaleTwo quarts of cream plus a pound each of sugar and fruit makes something over three quarts of base before churning, and more once air is worked in, which will overflow most home machines. Quarter the recipe for a standard 1.5-quart bowl.
- RipeningThe recipe stops at "freeze," but soft-churned ice cream needs two to three hours in a hard freezer to firm up. A tablespoon or two of brandy or kirsch, which appears in some period versions, keeps it from setting brick-hard.
Tutti frutti is simply Italian for "all fruits," and by the second half of the nineteenth century it had become a standard American confectioner's term for anything — ice cream, candy, preserves — studded with mixed candied fruit. Its appearance in a domestic cookbook of this period says something about how far ice cream had travelled from the professional confectioner's shop: the natural ice trade put packed ice within reach of ordinary households, and the hand-crank freezer with its inner can and salt-and-ice jacket made a dessert that once required a specialist into something a family could turn out on a Sunday. The candied fruit matters too. Preserved cherries, apricots and pineapple were pantry goods, either put up at home in heavy syrup or bought by the pound, and a recipe like this one was as much a way of using them decoratively as it was a flavour choice. The formula — rich cooked custard, vanilla, fruit added only once the cream has begun to set so the pieces stay suspended rather than sinking — is essentially unchanged in ice cream making today.