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Tutti Frutti Pudding
Cut into small dice pieces six candied cherries, two candied figs, one candied apricot, two candied pears, three vanilla marrons, one candied lemon peel, one ounce candied citron and one ounce well-picked currants; place in a bowl with a tablespoon rum, two tablespoons maraschino, one saltspoon ground cinnamon, four egg yolks and three ounces granulated sugar; mix well with wooden spoon five minutes, add two ounces cake or bread crumbs and three ounces flour. Stir for two minutes. Beat the whites of the four eggs to a stiff froth and gradually add to the rest, gently mixing meanwhile. Pour preparation into a lightly buttered quart pudding mould, place on a tin, set in oven to bake forty minutes, remove, unmould on a hot dish, pour a Sabayon sauce over and serve.
A steamed-pudding batter in all but method: candied fruit soaked in spirits, bound with yolks, crumbs and flour, and lifted by beaten whites. It is baked dry rather than steamed, so the folding and the mould matter more than usual.
- Fold, do not stirThe whites are the only leavening in the pudding — there is no baking powder. Fold them in three additions with a spatula until barely combined; a batter this heavy with fruit and crumbs will deflate quickly if beaten.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the stated forty minutes suits a quart mould; test with a skewer at the centre.
- "Place on a tin""Place on a tin" most likely means setting the mould on a baking sheet rather than in a water bath — no water is mentioned. The sheet catches any overflow and buffers the bottom heat.
- MarronsVanilla marrons are marrons glacés — chestnuts candied in vanilla syrup. Three whole ones, diced, is roughly 2 oz. Candied chestnut pieces sold in jars work as well as the whole ones and cost far less.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Saltspoons were the small spoon of a Victorian cruet set and appear constantly in books of this period.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. "Well-picked" means going through them for stems and grit, still worth doing with loose-bought fruit.
- The liqueursMaraschino here is the clear, dry Italian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Three tablespoons of spirits in total is a flavouring, not a soak — mixing the fruit with the yolks and sugar for the full five minutes is what distributes it.
- UnmouldingButter the mould thoroughly, including any fluting, and let the pudding stand five minutes before turning out. Fruit that has settled against the metal will stick if you go straight from the oven.
- Sabayon sauceEgg yolks, sugar and wine whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foamy — the same as Italian zabaglione, and it must be made just before serving or it separates. Marsala is usual.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a quart mould will give roughly four to six servings.
Tutti frutti is simply Italian for "all fruits," and by the late nineteenth century it had become a catch-all name in American and European kitchens for anything studded with mixed candied fruit — ices, ice creams, puddings, and later chewing gum. This version belongs to the tradition of the rich moulded pudding that closed a formal dinner, a lighter cousin of the English Christmas pudding: same dried and candied fruit, same crumbs, but baked in forty minutes rather than steamed for hours, and finished with a sabayon instead of hard sauce. The ingredient list is a fair inventory of what a well-stocked confectioner supplied around 1900 — candied figs, apricots, pears, citron, and marrons glacés were all imported staples of the fancy-grocery trade, and their presence marks this as a dish for a household with an account somewhere good. The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe's assumption that a cook can produce a sabayon without being told how is characteristic of the book's professional footing.