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Butter Scotch
One cup of brown sugar, one cup of granulated sugar, two tablespoons of butter, two tablespoons of vinegar, four tablespoons of water, vanilla. Put sugar, butter, water and vinegar in kettle; boil about twenty-five minutes, or until substance becomes brittle when dropped into cold water; stir as little as possible while cooking. When brittle, take from fire, add vanilla and pour into buttered pan in a thin layer; mark in squares.
— Miss Clara L. Munger
A straightforward hard-crack sugar candy; the only real variable is temperature, and a thermometer removes all the guesswork the original relies on.
- The hinge: hard crack, not soft"Brittle when dropped into cold water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F. Below about 290F the candy stays chewy and sticky; above 320F the sugar begins to caramelize and turn bitter. A candy thermometer is more reliable than the twenty-five minutes given, which will vary with pan width and burner output.
- Why not to stirAgitating a boiling syrup encourages sugar crystals to form on the pan walls and seed the whole batch, giving a grainy, opaque result. Wash down the sides once with a wet brush at the start and then leave it alone. The vinegar does the same job chemically, inverting some of the sucrose so it resists crystallizing.
- KettleHere this means a heavy saucepan, not a tea kettle. Use one at least three times the volume of the syrup, since boiling sugar climbs, and use heavy-bottomed metal so the bottom does not scorch.
- SugarNineteenth-century brown sugar was less refined and more variable than today's, so no modern grade matches it exactly; light brown is a reasonable default, and dark brown will also work, giving a more molasses-forward flavor.
- Marking in squaresScore the surface with an oiled knife once the sheet is set but still slightly warm and flexible; in a thin layer that comes quickly, so watch it. Wait until it is cold and it will shatter along its own lines rather than yours.
- Pan and yieldThe batch spreads thin in an 8-inch square or a quarter-sheet pan and makes roughly a pound of candy. Butter the pan generously or line it with parchment.
- Vanilla off the heatAdd it after the pan leaves the burner, as the original says, and stand back: alcohol-based extract will spit in 300F sugar and the aroma flashes off if added earlier.
Butterscotch as a hard candy is usually associated with Yorkshire, and Doncaster is the town most often named as its home, though the traditional early-nineteenth-century origin story rests more on local tradition than on firm documentation. The second half of the name is sometimes explained as "scotched" in the sense of scored or cut into pieces, but this is a folk etymology and competes with other suggestions; the derivation is not settled. By the time community cookbooks of this kind were being compiled, butterscotch was a standard piece of home confectionery, cheap enough to make from pantry staples and requiring nothing but a pan and a bowl of cold water for testing. Signed contributions are typical of the genre: such books were commonly assembled from contributors' own submitted recipes, and the attribution to Miss Munger served as a credit.