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Tutti-Frutti Ice
Take 1 pint simple syrup, 1 pint water, 1 gill of kirschwasser, a teaspoonful of pure vanilla extract, the juice of 2 lemons and a pint of mixed fruits, cut into small pieces, as in the foregoing recipe; mix the syrup, water, liquor, vanilla and lemon juice, and freeze the mixture; then mix into it a meringue mass, made of the whites of 2 eggs and 2 ounces of powdered sugar, freeze again, then add the fruit; mix them lightly but thoroughly well in; the ice may then be molded and buried in ice and salt till needed for use.
A late soda-fountain water ice — no cream at all — enriched with an uncooked meringue and set in a mold. The meringue is the sticking point, and it is worth understanding the rest of the method even if you make a current recipe instead.
- Why not as writtenThe meringue is raw: whites and powdered sugar beaten cold and folded into a part-frozen ice, then held at freezer temperature until served. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing preserves rather than destroys it. Use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked syrup meringue.
- Holding time compounds itThe ice is molded and "buried in ice and salt till needed" — potentially hours in a brine bath of uncontrolled temperature. That is a long hold for an unpasteurized egg foam.
- A gillHalf a cup, so 4 fl oz of kirsch in a batch containing a pint of syrup and a pint of water. That is a substantial dose of spirit, and it will noticeably soften the freeze.
- Simple syrup at the fountainFountain simple syrup was generally heavier than the equal-parts syrup common today, often on the order of two parts sugar to one of water, so substituting a modern syrup measure for measure can throw the sweetness off.
- KirschwasserUnaged cherry brandy distilled from whole fruit including the stones, giving the dry almond note. It is not cherry liqueur or cherry brandy of the sweet, red sort, and the two are not interchangeable here.
- "The foregoing recipe"The fruit is the cut mixed fruit described in the preceding entry, which this recipe does not repeat. Any diced mixed fruit macerated in a little syrup and spirit occupies the same place.
- Ice and saltThe mold is packed in a rock-salt-and-ice brine, which drops below freezing and firms the ice hard enough to unmold. A domestic freezer does the same job, though the alcohol will keep this one somewhat softer than an alcohol-free ice.
- YieldThe liquid base is roughly a quart and a quarter; with the pint of fruit and the meringue folded in it comes to something under two quarts.
Tutti frutti is simply Italian for "all fruits," and by the later nineteenth century the phrase is generally said to have attached itself in America both to a preserve of chopped fruit kept under spirits in a crock and to the confectioner's ice studded with candied fruit. Its appearance in a soda book rather than a cookbook is the point: the American fountain of the 1890s and 1900s was a commercial kitchen in miniature, and the dispenser was expected to turn out frozen desserts, syrups and fancy ices alongside carbonated drinks. Recipes like this one, calling casually for a gill of kirsch, also date the book before 1920, when national Prohibition took effect — which is one reason a liquor-forward ice reads as belonging to the years before it, whatever the title page says.