Tutti Frutti
Make a quart of rich yolk-of-egg custard, color it cafe-au-lait with two ounces of sugar burnt to molasses color and dissolved in milk, flavor with a quarter pint of curacoa, strain, freeze and beat up thoroughly. Fill a quart measure with a mixture of different kinds of sugared fruits, candied dates, preserved water melon rind, candied citron, seedless raisins previously steeped in a liqueur, figs cut in pieces, some blanched almonds or anything of the sort that is good. Mix these fruits with the frozen custard and pack down with ice and salt to remain while you prepare the molds. Make also 2 quarts of orange ice in another freezer, add the white of eggs in the usual manner and beat it up white and smooth, then spread it evenly over the insides of 2 or 3 melon molds to coat them. Imbed the molds in the freezing mixture and when the coating of orange ice is frozen firm fill up with the tutti frutti. Spread the orange ice also on top, put on the lids, secure with a number of rubber bands, close all spaces securely with butter and place the molds in the freezing mixture to remain 2 or 3 hours. When to be served wash the outsides with a cloth dipped in tepid water, carefully turn out the tutti frutti on to a folded napkin on a dish, lay a decoration of gelatine paste upon the white surface and serve. Or it can be served individually in slices the same as Neapolitan ices. Nearly all ice cream molds, except the half melon shape, require a lid at each end because the pressure of air renders it difficult to withdraw the ices from a tall shape tightly soldered at the top.
This is a bombe glacée: a mold lined with orange ice and filled with fruited caramel-curaçao ice cream. The work is in the assembly, not the flavors, and almost every step assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt.
- The hinge: line the mold while the ice is softThe orange ice should be soft enough to spread when you paste it against the mold, then frozen firm before the tutti frutti goes in; the recipe has you imbed the coated molds in the freezing mixture until the lining is hard. If the lining is too stiff it may not adhere; if it is too loose it can slump and let the filling through.
- "Freezer" means the ice-and-salt bucketBoth mixtures are churned in a hand-crank freezer, and the packed ice and salt also serves as the deep-freeze for the molds. A modern ice cream machine handles the churning, but you still need a hard freeze for the two or three hours of setting; a home chest freezer will serve for this.
- A quarter pint of curaçaoHalf a cup, and that is a great deal of alcohol in a quart of custard. It will keep the center noticeably softer than the orange ice around it, which is part of the intended contrast, but reduce it if you want a firm slice.
- Sugar burnt to molasses colorTwo ounces of sugar cooked dry to a deep amber, then let down with a little hot milk. It is there for the caramel bitterness and the cafe-au-lait shade, not for sweetness. Take it off the heat the moment it smells nutty; past that it turns acrid and no amount of custard hides it.
- Raw egg whites in the orange ice"The usual manner" means beaten whites folded into the ice as a stabilizer, and they are never heated. Use pasteurized whites, which whip adequately, if the ice will be served to children, elderly guests, or anyone pregnant or immunocompromised.
- The candied fruitPreserved watermelon rind and candied citron are still sold, the first mostly in the South and the second at holidays. Any firm sugared fruit works, but drain and blot everything and chop it small; large wet pieces freeze into ice shards.
- Sealing the moldsThe butter smeared into the seams keeps salt water out of the ice cream, which is the real hazard of packing molds in a brine bath. If you are freezing in a modern freezer instead, plastic wrap under the lid is enough.
- UnmoldingA cloth wrung out in tepid water, a few seconds on each face, then invert. The folded napkin under the bombe is there to absorb meltwater, and it works.
- YieldThe stated quantities come to roughly four quarts in all: a quart of custard, a quart of fruit, and two quarts of orange ice, of which only part is used for the lining. Filling two or three melon molds, call it 16 to 20 servings, or a good many thin Neapolitan-style slices.
Tutti frutti is simply Italian for "all fruits," and by the 1890s the name attached to almost anything studded with candied fruit and steeped raisins — ices, puddings, chewing gum. What is described here is properly a bombe glacée, a French restaurant form in which one ice lines a mold and a richer one fills it, so that each slice shows two colors. It belongs to the era when hotel and restaurant pastry departments owned dozens of pewter and tin molds in melon, pyramid and fruit shapes, and when a dessert's value lay largely in the labor of getting it out of the mold intact — hence the closing note about lids at both ends, which is the voice of someone who has fought a tall soldered mold and lost.