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Tutti-Frutti
Put one pint brandy into a stone jar, add the various fruits as they come into market; to each quart of fruit add the same quantity of sugar, and stir the mixture each morning until all the fruit has been added. Raspberries, strawberries, apricots, peaches, cherries, and pineapples are the best to use.
This is a crock preserve built up over a whole summer rather than a dish made in an afternoon. Almost everything that can go wrong with it goes wrong in the first week, when the fruit-to-spirit ratio is at its worst.
- The hinge: keep everything submergedAny fruit riding above the liquid will mould, and mould in the crock spoils the lot. After each addition, press the fruit down with a small plate or a scalded saucer and check that the syrup covers it; if it does not, add more brandy rather than more sugar.
- "The same quantity of sugar"This is a volume measure, not a weight: a quart of sugar to a quart of prepared fruit. A quart of granulated sugar is roughly 1 lb 12 oz, rather more than a quart of prepared soft fruit weighs, so you are working with at least as much sugar as fruit by weight. That heavy sugar load, not the pint of brandy, is doing most of the preserving once the crock fills up.
- One pint of brandy will not go farBy the end of a season a full crock may hold six or eight quarts of fruit, at which point the original pint is diluted past any preservative strength. If you keep this pot going, top it up with more spirit at each addition, aiming to keep the liquid tasting frankly alcoholic. Use 80-proof brandy; nothing lower.
- The stone jarA glazed stoneware crock of a gallon or two, or a wide glass jar. Cover it but do not seal it hard: the mixture ferments gently and needs somewhere for gas to go. A cloth under a loose lid works well. Keep it cool and dark, around 60F, not on a sunny windowsill.
- Prepare the fruit properlyStone the cherries and apricots, hull the berries, peel and slice the peaches and pineapple. Everything should go in raw, dry and unblemished; one soft berry will start the whole crock off badly. Whole raspberries and strawberries will collapse into the syrup within days, which is expected.
- What not to addThe recipe names its fruits as the best to use, and they are a good guide. Apples and pears go woolly, bananas turn to sludge, and citrus peel makes the syrup bitter. Blueberries and plums keep their shape better than most and are reasonable additions.
- When it is readyGive it at least six weeks after the last fruit goes in, so the syrup and the spirit come together. Serve it in small quantities, spooned over ice cream, plain sponge or rice pudding, or with the syrup poured off as a cordial. A gallon crock yields a great many servings, and it keeps for months in a cool place.
- Judging spoilageGentle fizzing and a winey smell are normal. A fuzzy or coloured surface growth, a slimy or ropy syrup, or a smell of nail varnish or vinegar means the crock has gone over and should be thrown out entirely rather than skimmed.
Tutti-frutti is simply Italian for "all fruits," and in nineteenth-century American and English kitchens it named this rolling brandied crock. The method is the same as the German Rumtopf and the French confiture de vieux garçon — "old bachelor's jam" — a pot started with the first strawberries and closed with the last pineapple, opened at Christmas. Its appeal to a household was that it needed no fuel, no sealing and no processing kettle, only whatever fruit came into the market at its cheapest that week; the pot was kept in the cellar and fed all summer, and in some families a portion of the syrup was passed on to start a neighbour's crock. Its placement in the canning and preserving chapter is a reminder that home preservation in this period still leaned on sugar, spirit and salt at least as much as on the glass jar and the boiling-water bath.