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Butter Scotch
1 C sugar 1 C dark Karo syrup 1 T vinegar 1/4 t soda 1/2 C butter Boil to a hard snap, stirring sufficiently to prevent burning. Flavor to taste and pour out the syrup in a thin layer. Check when cool.
A straightforward boiled sugar candy, written for a cook who already knew the cold-water test. The two words that need translating are "hard snap" and "check."
- "Boil to a hard snap"This is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. A drop of syrup slid into ice water should set into brittle threads that snap rather than bend.
- "Check when cool"Most likely means scoring the slab into squares rather than inspecting it, so it breaks cleanly along the lines. Note that the recipe says to do this when cool, not while warm.
- Dark KaroStill sold, though how closely the modern product matches the version of a century ago is unclear; it is now corn syrup with refiners' syrup and caramel color. Regular light corn syrup plus a tablespoon of molasses will get closer to a molasses-tinged flavor.
- The vinegar and sodaThe acid inverts some of the sucrose, which helps keep the candy glassy instead of grainy; the soda neutralizes the acid and is generally credited with aerating the mass slightly. The recipe does not say when the soda is added; if it goes into hot syrup, expect a brief foaming surge, so allow plenty of headroom in the pan.
- Stirring"Sufficiently to prevent burning" is the right amount. Butter and corn syrup scorch on the bottom, but vigorous stirring at high temperature encourages crystallization, so keep it to slow, occasional passes with a heatproof spatula.
- Pouring outA buttered rimmed sheet pan or an oiled marble slab. A thin layer means about 1/4 inch; thicker and it becomes a tooth-breaker rather than a candy.
- FlavoringVanilla is the usual choice, added off the heat so it does not flash off. A pinch of salt is optional; the recipe does not say whether the butter was salted.
- YieldRoughly a pound of candy, or about sixty 1-inch squares. Store airtight; humidity turns the surface tacky within a day.
Butterscotch appears in an icings-and-fillings chapter, hard candy sitting nearer to sweets than to anything else in the table of contents. Broken into shards it also served as a cake decoration and, crushed, as a filling flavoring. The name is generally traced to nineteenth-century Yorkshire rather than to Scotland, with "scotch" often said to refer to scoring or scotching the cooled sheet into pieces -- exactly the step this recipe calls checking. The reliance on Karo gives an earliest possible date: corn syrup was marketed under that name from 1902 onward.