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Tutti-frutti
1 pound orange pulp 1 pound raspberries 1 pound red currants 1 pound pears 1 pound red cherries 1 pound plums 1 pound bananas 1 pound peaches 1 pound pineapple 1 pound strawberries 1 pound apples 1 pint alcohol 11 pounds sugar Put the orange pulp into an earthen crock; add one pound sugar, and two tablespoons alcohol; add this same amount of sugar and alcohol every time a pound of fruit is added. Keep covered with a cloth and tight-fitting cover. Apple or Crab Apple Jelly Wash and wipe fruit. Remove stems; cut in pieces, put in preserving kettle, nearly cover with cold water; cook very slowly until apples are tender. Pour into jelly bag and drain thoroughly, but do not squeeze. Measure juice, allow one pound of sugar to every pint of juice. Boil juice twenty minutes; add sugar which has been heated on a platter in the oven; stir until sugar is dissolved; boil five minutes or until it jellies. Skim when necessary. Have jelly glasses standing in hot water; pour jelly into them; let stand until hard and cover first with paper or melted paraffin and the tin cover, or paste white paper over the glass. Keep all jellies in cool, dry, dark place.
A rose geranium leaf cooked with the apples gives a pleasant flavor.
Two separate preserves have been run together on this page: a raw brandied-fruit crock and a conventional boiled apple jelly. The first cannot be recommended today; the second is a recognisable jelly method that only needs its measurements and its sealing brought up to date.
- Why the tutti-frutti failsEleven pounds of raw fruit and eleven pounds of sugar are wetted with two tablespoons of alcohol at a time as each pound of fruit goes in, about eleven fluid ounces in all, less than the pint the list calls for. Depending on whether that alcohol is a 40 percent brandy or near-neat grain spirit, the finished crock works out at only a few percent alcohol, far too little to preserve anything, and the recipe never gives a temperature, a holding time, or any heat step at all.
- The cloth coverA cloth under a lid is an open, aerobic vessel. Surface yeasts and moulds will establish on a sweet raw-fruit mash held at room temperature for weeks, and some of the moulds that colonise stone fruit and apples produce mycotoxins that are not destroyed by later cooking. Skimming the surface is not an acceptable control.
- "1 pint alcohol" is not a usable quantityIn 1907 this could mean 95 percent grain alcohol from the druggist or a 40 percent brandy. Since the whole preservative claim of the recipe rests on that one line, and the strength is unknowable, there is no honest way to reconstruct it. Use a current tested recipe for brandied fruit if you want one.
- Orange pulpThe instruction means the flesh of the oranges freed of peel, pith and membrane, not juice. It is the first fruit in, and a crock of this kind was presumably filled as further fruits came to hand, though the recipe itself says nothing about timing or season.
- Apple jelly: sugar by weightOne pound of sugar to a pint of juice is about 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups juice. Heating the sugar on a platter in the oven, at no temperature the book troubles to give, simply keeps it from checking the boil when it goes in; it is optional with modern stoves.
- Do not squeeze the bagThe one instruction in the jelly that matters. Pressing the pulp forces starch and fine solids through and gives a cloudy jelly that will not clear afterwards. Let it drip, even if it takes several hours.
- Boiling times are indicative onlyTwenty minutes to reduce the juice and five more after the sugar goes in assumes a wide kettle and hard-set crab apples full of natural pectin. Judge by sheet test or by 220F at sea level rather than the clock; ripe dessert apples may need considerably longer.
- Paraffin sealing is obsoleteMelted paraffin over jelly in a glass, or pasted paper, was standard for a century and is no longer considered a safe seal: the wax shrinks and cracks and admits mould. Fill hot into sterilised jars with two-piece lids and process in a boiling-water bath.
- Rose geraniumThe scented-leaf pelargonium, not a rose. One leaf per kettle is enough; it gives the faintly rosy, lemony note found in other apple jellies of the period.
Tutti-frutti is simply Italian for "all fruits", and the name appears to have reached English through nineteenth-century confectionery and ice cream before it attached itself to this kind of preserve. The crock itself belongs to a wide European family of slowly built brandied-fruit pots, of which the German Rumtopf is the best known survivor: you start it with whatever is ripe first, add sugar and spirit each time a new fruit comes into the market, and open it at Christmas. Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate makers, and like other manufacturer-sponsored books of the period it set its chocolate chapters within a full general cookery course, preserving included. The scented-geranium leaf in the apple jelly suits the period: pelargoniums were common house plants, and their leaves were used as a flavouring in jellies and cakes.