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Tutti Frutti Preserves
Into a stone jar put one cup of sugar, one cup of brandy and one cup of ripe strawberries. Stir thoroughly. All through the summer add each fruit in its season, always adding the same quantity of sugar as fruit, but no more brandy. Cherries and plums should be stoned. Large fruit like peaches and oranges should be cut into small pieces. These delicious preserves will be ready to use in the autumn, after the last of the native fresh fruits have been added.
This is a summer-long brandied fruit crock — the American cousin of the German Rumtopf. The method as printed relies on alcohol to keep months of raw fruit safe at room temperature, and the quantity given cannot do that job.
- The alcohol never keeps upOne cup of brandy is added at the start and never again, while fruit and sugar go in through the summer from strawberry season to the last peaches. Brandy is roughly 40 percent alcohol in the bottle, and it is diluted from the first stir; as pounds of watery fruit are added over the months the alcohol in the liquid falls progressively further. Preservation by spirit depends on the liquid staying strong — Rumtopf recipes keep the fruit submerged in high-proof rum for this reason.
- Months at room temperatureA stone jar opened and stirred repeatedly through July and August is an open, warm, low-acid-in-places, sugar-rich medium. Yeasts and moulds colonise the surface readily, and the recipe gives no temperature, no seal, no headspace rule and no sterilisation step at any point.
- No measured quantities"Each fruit in its season" and "the same quantity of sugar as fruit" set a ratio but no total. There is no way to know the final sugar concentration or the final alcohol strength, which are the only two things standing between this and spoilage.
- Fermentation is not the same as preservationSuch crocks bubble. That only means wild yeast is eating the sugar and producing carbon dioxide; the alcohol it makes is low and unevenly distributed, and it does nothing about surface mould.
- Stone jarsSome historic crockery carried lead glazes, though crocks of this kind were more often salt-glazed stoneware and lead glazes commoner on earthenware. Acidic fruit and alcohol in prolonged contact with a lead glaze can leach it, so an antique crock should not be used for food unless the glaze is known to be lead-free.
- If you want brandied fruitUse a current, tested Rumtopf or brandied-fruit recipe with a specified spirit strength, a specified fruit-to-sugar-to-spirit ratio, and cold storage. Do not adapt this one.
"Tutti frutti" — Italian for "all fruits" — was the American name for a preserve that Germans call Rumtopf and the French confiture de vieux garçon, the bachelor's jam. The principle is the same everywhere: a crock is started with the first soft fruit of the season and fed as each later fruit ripens, so that out of season a household can eat strawberries, cherries, plums and peaches together. It belongs to a period when a jar of preserved summer fruit was a genuine luxury in winter, and it appears in The Butterick Cook Book (1911) alongside directions for the newer, safer glass-jar canning that was already displacing it. The open crock method is the older technique, and it survived in print in part because it required no equipment beyond a jar and a spoon.