Feeling fruity T
Phone: Website: Opening hours: Monday closed, Tuesday to Saturday 10am to midnight (last food served 9pm). Food only served on evenings on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays Children: Yes, mainly at lunchtimes Disabled access: It’s quite compact inside, so not much room to manoeuvre The bill: £54.80 Would you go back? HIS week we’re once again hopping aboard our culinary time machine and heading back to the 1970s, in the hope of reviving a lost classic, Tutti Frutti ice-cream.
This piece came about as I was browsing my Twitter feed, and an author I follow, Stuart Heritage, asked the question “How come you can’t find Tutti Frutti ice-cream anywhere any more?”
It had never occurred to me, to be honest, but when I thought about it, he was right – it has largely disappeared from our freezers, replaced by the more transcontinental flavours the likes of Ben and Jerry and Häagen Dazs have introduced.
As a flavouring, tutti frutti, a name given to any melange of dried fruit and nuts, has been around since the early 1900s, but only with the advent of refrigeration and mass-production did the famous ice-cream come about.
It’s hard enough locating a good old tub of Neapolitan these days (strawberry first, then vanilla, then chocolate, in case you’re wondering) let alone this classic of the old ice-cream parlour.
I remember marvelling at the colours of the tutti frutti as a child, on the frequent occasions dad took me down to the wonderful Jimmy Caddy’s in Dewsbury.
Alongside all the amazing flavours in that wonderful, noisy palace of chrome and red leather sat the tub of tutti frutti, deep golden in colour, flecked with bright red cherries and iridescent green angelica.
There were big slices of nuts, and juicy golden raisins. Very tempting, but I always went for a cola float. I was a kid, after all, and tutti frutti seemed to be a very grown-up flavour.
It was, through the 80s, still going strong in the ‘red sauce’ joints, those lovely, chaotic family-run Italian restaurants where the icecream fridge stands in the dining room, and the grandmother of the family runs the till with a steely glare. But then, it seemed to disappear almost overnight, pushed aside by a tide of mint-choc-chip and cookie dough.
Nowadays, in this age of salted butter caramel and top-end artisan gelato, tutti frutti ice-cream seems to be a rapidly fading star.
Well no more, because right here is where we fight back, and reinstate it as a bona-fide classic.
Once I’d made it, my first scoop was a whirlwind of memories, and share the recipe.
My never-fail basic parfait mix serves as our base (avoiding having to use an ice-cream maker, making it possible for anyone) and we’re filling it with all those incredible flavours of fruit and nuts, along with a quite considerable kick of booze.
The Kirsch and Amaretto really add that unmistakable flavour, as does the ginger. Angelica, too, is essential, for both flavour and
I bought mine via a famous conglomerate named after a long river in Brazil, and when the packet arrived it had come all the way from…Holmfirth. I could have driven there in minutes!
Modern life is confusing sometimes.
Anyway, please do try this recipe – it’s wonderful, and I guarantee that for many people, that first mouthful will be a wonderful sensory trip down memory lane.