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Italian Tutti Frutti
Soften one-fourth box of Larkin Gelatine in one-half cup of cold water. Make a syrup of two cups of sugar and one quart of water by boiling twenty minutes. Pour over Gelatine, strain, and cool. When sufficiently cool, put into freezer, adding the juice of four lemons, four oranges, with the grated rind of two of the oranges. Freeze, using three parts of ice to one of salt, and when the mixture is partially frozen add one pound of candied fruits and almonds, cut fine, and soaked in one cup of grape-juice for several hours or over night. When thoroughly mixed take out dasher, re-pack and allow to ripen an hour before serving.
A gelatine-set water ice churned in a hand-crank freezer. The method translates cleanly to a modern machine, but two of the measurements need decoding first.
- A quarter box of gelatinePeriod gelatine came by the box, and a quarter box works out to roughly one modern envelope (about 1/4 oz, 2 1/4 teaspoons), though box sizes were not standard across brands. Larkin was one of several brands sold by mail; any unflavoured powdered gelatine behaves the same.
- Why gelatine at allIt is not there to set the mixture solid. In a sugar-and-water ice with no dairy or egg, a small amount of gelatine keeps the ice crystals fine and stops the sorbet turning to a block. Do not increase it or the texture goes rubbery.
- The syrupTwo cups sugar to one quart water boiled a full twenty minutes loses a noticeable amount of water, so the finished syrup is appreciably sweeter than the starting proportion; how much you lose depends on the width of the pan. That concentration is deliberate; a weak syrup freezes hard.
- "Put into freezer"The freezer is the crank churn with its dasher, not a cold cupboard. Chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator first, then churn; adding the citrus juice cold rather than warm preserves the fresh flavour.
- Three parts ice to one of saltMeasured by volume, coarse rock salt against cracked ice, packed in the bucket around the can. That much salt drives the brine well below freezing point, cold enough to freeze the mixture quickly and to hold it hard while ripening. An electric machine with a frozen bowl does the same job and needs no salt at all.
- The soaked fruitA pound of candied fruits and almonds soaked overnight in grape juice is the whole point of the dish, and the soaking keeps them from freezing into stones. Chop them small, and add them only when the base is at soft-serve stage, as the recipe's "partially frozen" indicates, or they will sink and jam the dasher.
- RipeningRemoving the dasher, repacking in ice and salt and standing an hour lets the ice firm and the flavours settle. In a modern kitchen, transfer to a chilled container and hold in the freezer an hour; longer than two or three hours and it will need a few minutes on the counter before scooping.
- YieldTwo quarts or a little more once the fruit is in; enough for eight to ten servings.
Tutti frutti — literally "all fruits" — was a common name in American cookery for a frozen dessert studded with mixed candied fruit, usually soaked in liquor and, in this period, sometimes in grape juice instead. Italian confectioners were prominent in the ice trade in nineteenth-century American cities, which may account for the Italian label, though the dish as written here is thoroughly domestic. The grape juice in place of maraschino or brandy is worth noticing: bottled unfermented grape juice became widely available in the decades before Prohibition and was promoted to temperance households, and period cookbooks do substitute it into desserts. The named brand of gelatine suggests something about how the book reached its readers — Larkin of Buffalo sold soap and household goods by mail with premiums, and Larkin's own recipe publications named Larkin products.