Home › Syrups and Ices › Tutti Frutti
Tutti Frutti
To make this ice a special ice cream mold is necessary, or a tin receptacle that can be closed hermetically.
Take several varieties of fruits of the season, ripe and of good quality, that is to say, strawberries, cherries, plums, apricots, a big peach, a good sized pear, a piece of good cantaloupe. Peel, skin and remove stones and cores of all these fruits. Then cut them into very thin slices, throwing away the cores and stones. When the fruit is prepared in this manner, weigh it, and sprinkle over one fifth of its weight of powdered sugar, squeezing also one lemon. Mix everything and let the mixture rest for half an hour.
Put a sheet of paper in the bottom of the mold that is to be filled with the fruit pressed together, close, and pack in salt and ice, keeping it for two hours or a little less.
This is not the tutti frutti ice cream as is known in America, but a macédoine of fruits, that comes very pleasant to the taste in the summer months.
ASA
This is a frozen fruit salad set in a sealed mould, not a custard ice, and nothing here is churned. The whole method hinges on keeping brine out of the fruit.
- The mould and the sealAn old ice-cream or "bombe" mould had a tight-fitting lid meant to be buried in salted ice. A straight-sided loaf tin or metal pudding basin works if you double-wrap it in plastic film and then foil; any seepage of brine will ruin the fruit with salt. The sheet of paper in the base is there to help you turn the block out.
- Salt and ice, or just the freezerThe traditional pack is roughly one part coarse rock salt to three parts crushed ice by volume, replenished as it melts, in a bucket or cooler with a drain. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job with no fuss, though it will take four to six hours rather than two for a filled loaf tin.
- One fifth sugar by weightWeigh the prepared fruit and add 20 percent of that weight in powdered (superfine) sugar. On 2 lb of fruit that is about 6 1/2 oz. The sugar is structural as much as sweet: it lowers the freezing point so the block stays sliceable rather than setting rock hard.
- The half-hour restThis is maceration. The sugar draws out juice that becomes the syrup binding the slices together in the mould. Do not skip it or shorten it, or the fruit freezes as loose pieces in ice.
- Slice thin, and mind the waterVery thin slices freeze into a coherent block; chunks do not. Cantaloupe and pear are watery and will throw ice crystals, so drain any excess liquid off before packing rather than pouring it all in.
- Pack it tight"Pressed together" means firmly, in layers, with no air pockets. Air pockets make the finished block crumble when unmoulded.
- Unmoulding and servingDip the mould briefly in warm water, turn out, peel off the paper and cut in slices with a warmed knife. Let it stand five minutes before serving so it is cold rather than numbing. A 2 lb mould serves six to eight.
- Fruit choiceStrawberries, cherries, plums, apricots, peach, pear and melon are a summer market list. Citrus segments and raw pineapple are probably best left out of a frozen block.
Tutti frutti is simply "all fruits," and the note at the end is the point of the entry: the author is correcting an American expectation. In the United States tutti-frutti had come to mean a custard ice studded with candied peel and glacé fruit; here it is used closer to a macédoine of seasonal fruit, sliced, sugared and dressed — here frozen into a block rather than served in a glass. Freezing by immersion in salted ice was the method available to a domestic cook before mechanical refrigeration; salt dissolving in ice water drives the temperature well below freezing point, and a hermetically closed mould buried in the pack was how bombes, biscuits glacés and moulded fruit ices were made.