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Cocoanut Butter Scotch
1 cup sugar. ¼ cup molasses 1 tablespoon vinegar 1/2 cup butter 2 tablespoons boiling water 1/2 cup Dromedary Cocoanut Into a saucepan put sugar, molasses, vinegar, water and butter and cook until sirup is brittle when tested in cold water. Add cocoanut and pour at once into a greased tin. Break in pieces when cold.
A straightforward hard candy, but the ingredient list has come through the printing with damage: sugar appears in the method and never in the list, and the molasses quantity is garbled. Read the points below before you start.
- The missing sugarThe instructions call for sugar but no quantity is given. Comparable butterscotch formulas of the period use about 1 cup granulated or light brown sugar to this amount of butter and molasses; the original is simply incomplete on this point, so treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than the author's.
- "14 cup molasses"Most likely 1/4 cup, the fraction having lost its stroke in printing; a full cup against half a cup of butter would give an unusually molasses-heavy sweet for a butterscotch, though molasses boiled this hard does set brittle.
- Test by thermometer"Brittle when tested in cold water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F. A drop in ice water should form threads that snap rather than bend. Below that the candy stays chewy; above about 315F the molasses scorches and turns acrid.
- Dromedary CocoanutA branded shredded dried coconut sold by Hills Brothers; how it compared in moisture and cut to modern desiccated coconut is not documented. Sweetened flake works; unsweetened medium shred is probably closer to the original texture. Toasting it first deepens the flavour and drives off moisture that would otherwise soften the candy.
- The vinegarNot for flavour. A tablespoon of acid inverts some of the sucrose as the syrup boils, which is what keeps the finished scotch from turning grainy. Do not leave it out.
- Coconut goes in off the heatAdd it the instant the syrup reaches temperature and stir only enough to distribute. Held on the burner it will brown and the syrup will keep climbing past the target.
- The tinA greased 8-inch square pan, or a rimmed sheet if you want it thinner. Score the surface with an oiled knife while the slab is still warm and pliable; waiting until it is cold means breaking it into whatever shapes it chooses.
- YieldDepends on the sugar quantity you settle on; with about a cup of sugar, in the region of three-quarters of a pound. Keep it airtight, as the coconut will draw damp and the candy turns sticky in a humid kitchen.
Butterscotch as a boiled sugar-and-butter candy is generally traced to nineteenth-century Yorkshire, and by the 1900s American cookbooks treated it as ordinary household confectionery. The branded ingredient points to a promotional booklet for Dromedary shredded coconut, a Hills Brothers Company brand -- one of the many single-ingredient recipe pamphlets manufacturers gave away. Before packaged shredded coconut was on sale, a cook wanting coconut had to crack and grate the nut herself. Such pamphlets generally work by showing that the product belongs in dishes the reader already knows how to make, which is why the coconut here is folded into an otherwise conventional scotch rather than being the point of it.