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Butter Scotch
One cup of sugar One-quarter cup of molasses One tablespoon of vinegar Two tablespoons of boiling water One-half cup of butter Boil ingredients until when tried in cold water the mixture will become brittle. Turn into a wellbuttered pan, and when slightly cool mark into squares with a sharp-pointed knife.
A four-ingredient hard candy that lives or dies by temperature. The cold-water test is the whole recipe; a thermometer just makes it repeatable.
- The hinge: hard crack"Brittle" in cold water points to the hard-crack stage, around 300-310F. A drop of syrup should shatter between your fingers rather than bend. Stopped short of that, the batch is likely to stay chewy and to go sticky as it sits.
- MeasuresOne cup sugar is about 7 oz; half a cup of butter is one stick, 4 oz. The quarter cup of molasses should be a mild unsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and scorches faster than the sugar cooks.
- Why the vinegarThe tablespoon of vinegar inverts some of the sucrose so the batch stays smooth instead of turning grainy. Most of it boils away, and the finished candy should not taste sour.
- Pan and heatUse a heavy saucepan several times the volume of the ingredients, since butter and sugar foam up as they boil. Medium heat throughout, and stop stirring once the sugar has dissolved; wash any crystals off the sides with a wet brush.
- Turning outA well-buttered 8-inch square pan gives slabs about a quarter inch thick. Anything larger and the candy sets too thin to score cleanly.
- Marking the squaresScore while the surface has set but the interior is still soft, which is what "slightly cool" means here. Wait too long and the slab will crack where it likes rather than where you mark it.
- Yield and keepingAbout three-quarters of a pound, roughly forty small squares. Store airtight with waxed paper between layers; humidity will make the surface tacky within hours.
Butterscotch is generally traced to early nineteenth-century Yorkshire, and Doncaster in particular, where it was sold as a hard boiled sweet; the "scotch" is often explained as the old verb meaning to score or cut — one of several competing folk etymologies — which is precisely what this recipe tells you to do with the point of a knife before the slab sets. By 1911, when Rufus Estes published Good Things to Eat, candy of this kind appears as standard home-kitchen work rather than a confectioner's specialty, though the reasons for that shift are a matter of inference rather than record. Estes, born into slavery in Tennessee and later a Pullman dining-car chef, wrote his book for a general audience, and its dessert section leans toward exactly this sort of thing: short, cheap, dependable sweets built from staples already in the pantry.