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Tutti-Frutti
Preserve the various fruits as they come in season, following the recipe for Preserved Strawberries on page 372, and sealing in separate jars. When the desired number of fruits have been preserved, empty all into the preserving kettle; mix well; bring to a boil and when cool put into glass jars or tumblers. Pineapple, cherries, peaches, apricots, white grapes and the berries are the best fruits to use.
This is a two-stage preserve: fruits put up singly through the summer, then combined, reboiled and re-jarred at the end of the season. As written it gives no sugar ratio, no processing, and no seal you can trust, which is why it should not be followed today.
- No measured quantities anywhereThe recipe names no weights of fruit and no weight of sugar, deferring entirely to a preserved-strawberry recipe on another page. Sugar concentration is the only thing standing between a preserve and a spoiled jar, and a blend of pineapple, grapes and stone fruit cannot inherit one fruit's ratio safely. Without a measured ratio there is no way to judge whether the finished mixture is preserved at all.
- Filled cold into open containers"When cool put into glass jars or tumblers" means the fruit is exposed to air and room-temperature handling at the moment it is most vulnerable, and the recipe names no closure at all for the finished mixture. Jelly tumblers were commonly closed with paraffin wax or paper, which mold can grow under and which does not reliably exclude air. Modern practice fills hot and processes the sealed jar; nothing here does either.
- No heat processingA single "bring to a boil" in the kettle is not a process. Nothing in the recipe brings the contents of a closed jar to temperature for a measured time, so there is no step that deals with mold, yeasts or the surface contamination picked up during filling.
- Reboiling a season's worth of separate jarsEach of those jars has been sitting for weeks or months with an unverified seal. Emptying them all into one kettle means any single spoiled jar contaminates the whole batch, and a brief boil will not reverse fermentation or off-flavors already developed. Nothing in the recipe asks the cook to inspect them.
- Texture, if you were wondering why it was doneTexture, if you were wondering -- Twice-cooked fruit collapses. Pineapple and apricots hold up better; raspberries and strawberries will break down into a seedy syrup in the second boiling.
- If you want the dishUse a current tested recipe for mixed-fruit preserves or conserve, with stated sugar weights and a boiling-water canning time for your jar size and altitude.
Tutti-frutti is simply Italian for "all fruits," and in nineteenth-century American and English kitchens it named two related things: a preserve like this one, built up from whatever ripened in succession, and the crock version in which fruit and sugar were layered into brandy over the course of a summer and drawn on all winter. Both belong to a period when a household preserved continuously from strawberries in June to grapes in September, and the odds and ends of the season needed somewhere to go. Mrs. Fryer's book, issued in loose-leaf form — a format one imagines was meant to let pages be swapped and added — was aimed at exactly that kind of running domestic accounting: the recipe assumes you already have the strawberry preserve page in front of you. The name also traveled: by the time this was printed, tutti-frutti could mean a candied-fruit ice cream flavor as well as a jar in the cellar.