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Butterscotch Squares
1/4 C butter. 1 C brown sugar. 1 egg. 3/4 C flour. 1 t baking powder 1/2 t vanilla ¼ C pecan nuts Salt Cook butter and sugar until smooth and well blended; then cool to luke-warm. Add unbeaten egg and beat well. Add flour sifted with baking powder, then vanilla and chopped nuts. Spread in pan, buttered, and bake in moderate oven. Cut in squares. Time in oven ½ hour.
This is an early blondie — a butterscotch bar made by melting butter with brown sugar rather than creaming them. The transcription has lost part of its ingredient list, so read the notes below before you shop.
- Missing quantitiesThe printed list begins mid-column: the amounts of butter, brown sugar, flour and egg (one, from the singular "unbeaten egg") are gone. A conventional bar of this type runs about 1/4 cup butter, 1 cup brown sugar, 3/4 cup flour and 1 egg, but the original figures are genuinely lost and cannot be recovered from the page.
- Fractions mangled by the type"14 C pecan nuts" is almost certainly 1/4 cup, and "Time in oven 12 hour" half an hour. Note that "1/2 t vanilla" kept its slash, so the loss is inconsistent rather than systematic.
- The sugar is brownThe sugar is probably brown -- "butterscotch" in this period usually means butter cooked with brown sugar rather than a flavouring extract, though the recipe itself specifies only "sugar". Light or dark brown sugar gives the caramel note the name promises; white sugar gives a paler, flatter bar.
- Cool before the eggThis is the hinge. "Cool to luke-warm" means under about 110F — hot butter-sugar syrup will scramble the egg into visible threads and the bar will bake grainy. Give it ten minutes off the heat.
- Moderate ovenConventionally about 350F. Half an hour at that temperature suits a pan of roughly 8x8 inches; the recipe names no pan size.
- SaltListed without an amount. A scant 1/4 teaspoon suits a single-egg batter, and it tells here because brown sugar alone can read cloying.
- Cut warm, not hotScore the squares while the pan is still warm and lift them out once fully cool. Cut hot and the centres tear; cut cold and the caramelised edges shatter.
- YieldAbout 16 squares from an 8-inch pan.
Butterscotch squares belong to the first generation of American bar cookies, which became widespread in the early decades of the twentieth century, in part because they suited the way church and club cookbooks were used: one pan, no rolling, no cutter, and a tray of uniform pieces for a supper or bazaar table. The word butterscotch is generally traced to nineteenth-century Britain, where it described a hard boiled sweet of butter and brown sugar; American home bakers borrowed the name for anything with that flavour, and by the time this book was compiled it signalled brown sugar cooked in butter. Pecans mark the recipe as American rather than English.