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Tutti Frutti
This is the Italian for all sorts and kinds of fruit. The name is applied to a great variety of fruit dishes, ices, etc., as will be seen by the following recipes: Line the interior of a three-pint lemon-shaped mould with one pint of vanilla cream. Cut four ounces of candied apricots into small pieces, also four ounces of candied cherries into halves. Mix these well together. Spread half the quantity of the fruits evenly round the cream in the mould and pour one pint of raspberry water ice all round the fruits. Arrange the balance of the fruits round the water ice and fill the mould with one pint of pistachio cream ice. Cover the mould tightly, place it in a pail with a layer of broken ice and rock-salt at the bottom; fill up to the top with the same and put it into a freezer. Freeze for an hour and a half. Turn out the tutti frutti on a glass stand and serve with the following sauce: Put in a basin one pint of whipped cream with two ounces of sugar and one gill of maraschino. Beat the whole well together for two minutes. Pour it over the tutti frutti, and immediately send it to the table.
This is a bombe: three layers frozen in a lidded mould packed in ice and salt, then turned out whole. The layering, not the freezing, is where it succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: work with hard ice creamEach layer must be firm enough to hold a wall before the next is added. Line the chilled mould with the vanilla, freeze it solid, add fruit and raspberry ice, freeze again, then finish with the pistachio. Poured in soft, one pint of water ice will simply cut a channel through the cream.
- "Cream ice" and "water ice"A cream ice is a churned dairy ice, usually custard-based (egg yolks and scalded cream) though sometimes simply sweetened cream; a water ice is a sorbet of fruit juice, sugar syrup and water with no dairy. The contrast between the two is the point of the dish.
- A gillHalf a cup, so 4 fl oz of maraschino to a pint of whipped cream and 2 oz of sugar. That is a generous amount of liqueur and will keep the cream loose; whip to soft peaks only, since it will slacken further.
- The freezerHere the mould is first packed in a pail of broken ice and rock salt, and the "freezer" it then goes into appears to be a further ice-and-salt container rather than anything mechanical, though hand-cranked ice-cream freezers were common by the 1890s. A modern chest or upright freezer at 0F does the same work, but allow considerably longer than the hour and a half quoted, since ice-and-salt brine chills far faster than still air.
- Mould size and yieldThree pints of frozen mixture plus fruit serves ten to twelve in small portions. Any lidded metal mould, pudding basin or loaf tin will do; metal releases more cleanly than plastic or ceramic.
- UnmouldingDip the sealed mould in warm water for ten to fifteen seconds, wipe it, run a thin knife round the rim and invert onto a chilled platter. Do this at the table's convenience, not in advance, and return it to the freezer if there is any wait.
- Candied fruitModern glace cherries tend to be firmer and sweeter than the nineteenth-century article. Chop the apricots small, halve the cherries as directed, and steep them for twenty minutes in a spoonful of the maraschino so they do not freeze into hard nuggets.
- Serving the sauceBeat and pour it only as the bombe goes to the table. Sweetened whipped cream with that much spirit in it will slacken and weep quickly.
Tutti frutti is exactly what Oscar says it is, Italian for "all fruits," and by the 1890s the phrase had been attached to everything from candied-fruit ice creams to chewing gum. The construction here is properly a bombe glacée, a French restaurant form in which contrasting ices are lined into a mould in concentric shells so that a single slice shows every layer at once; the elaborate figured moulds it required, lemon-shaped, melon-shaped, pyramidal, were standard equipment in hotel pastry departments and are the reason this sort of dessert belongs to The Waldorf Kitchen rather than to a home cook's chapter. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, not its chef, and his 1896 book records the house repertoire at a moment when a hotel dessert's prestige rested on cold work done entirely by hand: ice cut from lakes in winter, stored in ice houses, broken and packed with rock salt to reach the temperatures a bombe needs. Mechanical refrigeration was arriving in commercial kitchens in the same decade, which makes recipes like this one a fair snapshot of the last generation of ice-and-salt confectionery.