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Butter Scotch No. 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon flavoring few grains salt Boil all ingredients until a thread is formed when dropped from a spoon. Pour into hot buttered pans, crease, and let stand until hard. 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup molasses cup butter Butter Scotch No. 2 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon vinegar few grains salt Cook in the same way as Butter Scotch No. 1.
A boiled sugar candy of the plainest kind: brown sugar, molasses and butter taken to the hard-crack stage and scored into bars while still warm. The measurements as printed have lost several of their fractions, so treat the proportions below as the intent rather than the letter.
- The stage that mattersThe recipe's own test ("a thread is formed when dropped from a spoon") is not the modern thread stage (about 230F, which gives only syrup). For butterscotch that sets hard the syrup must go considerably further, into the crack range on a candy thermometer, where a drizzle into cold water turns brittle at once.
- Missing fractionsThe butter and soda amounts have lost their fractions in this printing. Butterscotch recipes of the period commonly pair something on the order of a quarter-cup of butter and a fraction of a teaspoon of soda with a cup each of brown sugar and molasses, but the original figures here cannot be recovered; No. 2 gives no sugar or molasses quantity at all.
- What the soda doesThe soda reacts with the acid in the molasses (and with the vinegar in No. 2) to foam the syrup slightly, giving a lighter, more brittle bite rather than a dense chew. Note that the recipe as printed directs boiling all the ingredients together; added later, off the heat, it will make the pan boil up sharply.
- FlavoringThe unspecified "flavoring" is most plausibly vanilla extract, though the book does not say. The teaspoon is the recipe's own measure.
- Pans and creasingWarm the pans and butter them well; cold metal chills the edges into an unworkable shell. "Crease" means to score the sheet into bars with a buttered knife while it is still pliable, about five minutes after pouring, so it snaps cleanly along the lines when hard.
- Stirring and scorchingMolasses and dairy butter both scorch readily above 250F. Use a heavy pan, stir slowly and constantly once the syrup thickens, and pull it the moment the thermometer reads temperature.
- Yield and keepingA cup of sugar with a cup of molasses gives something in the region of a pound of candy. Wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper; unwrapped butterscotch turns sticky quickly in humid air.
Butterscotch is generally traced to Yorkshire in the nineteenth century, where Doncaster confectioners built a reputation on hard butter-and-sugar toffee. The "scotch" element is unsettled: one often-repeated explanation is to scotch, meaning to score or cut, but others point to "scorched" or simply to Scotland, and none is proven. A candy chapter was a routine feature of general cookbooks of this period. The two numbered versions differ in that No. 2 adds a spoonful of vinegar alongside the soda, though its truncated ingredient list makes it impossible to say how closely it otherwise followed No. 1.