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Butter-Scotch
Three pounds "coffee A" sugar, fourth pound butter, half teaspoon cream tartar, eight drops extract of lemon; add as much cold water as will dissolve the sugar; boil without stirring till it will easily break when dropped in cold water, and when done, add the lemon; have a dripping-pan well buttered and pour in onefourth inch thick, and when partly cold, mark off in squares. If pulled, when partly cold, till very white, it will be like ice-cream candy.-Mrs. J. S. R.
A hard-crack candy of the plainest sort: sugar, butter, cream of tartar and lemon. The whole recipe hinges on cooking the syrup far enough and not stirring it once it boils.
- "Coffee A" sugarA nineteenth-century commercial grade of refined white sugar, slightly coarser than today's granulated but chemically the same. Ordinary granulated sugar is a direct substitute, three pounds being about 6 3/4 cups.
- How much waterThe recipe leaves the amount to the cook; enough cold water to dissolve three pounds of sugar is likely two cups or more. Excess water only lengthens the boil; too little risks scorching before the sugar is in solution.
- The hard-crack testSugar that "will easily break when dropped in cold water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a thermometer. Below that the candy stays tacky and will slump at room temperature.
- Do not stirStirring after the sugar dissolves throws crystals onto the pan wall and seeds the whole batch grainy. Wash the sides down with a wet pastry brush instead; the cream of tartar is there for the same reason, inverting some of the sugar to discourage crystallisation.
- Add the lemon off the heatEight drops of lemon extract is on the order of an eighth of a teaspoon. Alcohol-based extract will largely evaporate at hard-crack temperatures, so stir it in after the pan leaves the burner, as the recipe directs.
- The dripping-panA dripping-pan is the rimmed roasting pan that sat under a joint; a half-sheet pan is the modern equivalent, buttered heavily or lined with a silicone mat. Poured a quarter-inch thick, three pounds of sugar covers roughly a half-sheet.
- Marking the squaresScore with a buttered knife while the sheet is still warm and flexible, about five to ten minutes in. Left to go fully cold, it will only shatter along its own faults.
- The pulled versionPulling aerates the candy and turns it opaque white, which is what the recipe means by ice-cream candy. Wait until the mass is cool enough to handle in buttered hands.
- YieldAbout three and a quarter pounds of candy, which is a great deal. Halving the recipe is sensible unless you are making gifts.
Butter-scotch belongs to the family of hard boiled sugars that spread through British and American kitchens once refined sugar became cheap in the mid-nineteenth century; the name is generally traced to Yorkshire, where a butter-and-sugar toffee is traditionally said to have been sold commercially, though the "scotch" element is disputed, and a popular folk etymology holds that it refers to scoring, or "scotching", the slab into squares before it hardens — which is exactly what this recipe instructs. Buckeye Cookery (1877) prints it in a confectionery chapter aimed squarely at home candy-making, an evening amusement as much as a provisioning task, and the alternative ending — pull it until white and you have ice-cream candy — shows how one boiled syrup was expected to yield two different sweets. The initials at the end, Mrs. J. S. R., are typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named and half-named housewives, largely though not exclusively from Ohio.