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Cocoanut Butter Scotch
1/2 pound brown sugar 1/2 cup shredded cocoanut 3 ounces butter 3 teaspoons water 1 teaspoon vanilla Put the sugar, butter and water into a saucepan; boil for ten minutes, stirring only occasionally. Stir in the cocoanut; test by dropping a spoonful in cold water. If the mixture hardens remove from fire; add flavoring; pour into buttered tins; mark off in squares and stand away to harden.
A short, high-sugar candy that lives or dies on the temperature of the syrup. The ten-minute boil is a rough guide from a period without reliable thermometers; treat the cold-water test as the real instruction.
- The hinge: cold-water testButterscotch wants the syrup high, at or near hard-crack (roughly 290-300F), so it snaps rather than chews. A spoonful dropped into cold water should form brittle threads that shatter; if it flattens into a soft, bendable ball you are still a long way short -- a pliable ball is nearer 240-250F.
- Ten minutes is not a time, it is a rangeTen minutes is a guide, not a fixed time -- with only a tablespoon of water in the pan, how quickly the syrup reaches the hardening stage depends on the heat and the pan. Watch the colour and the test, not the clock, and pull it the moment it passes.
- Measurements in modern termsHalf a pound of brown sugar is roughly 1 1/8 cups packed. Three ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons. Three teaspoons of water is 1 tablespoon -- that is correct, not a misprint; this is nearly a dry caramel.
- CocoanutThe dried shredded coconut sold in this period was generally unsweetened. Modern sweetened flake will push an already sweet candy further and can scorch in the hot syrup; unsweetened desiccated or flaked coconut is the closer match.
- Stirring and crystallization"Stirring only occasionally" is deliberate -- agitating a boiling sugar syrup encourages it to grain. Swirl the pan rather than stir, and wash sugar crystals down from the sides with a wet pastry brush.
- Adding the coconutTwo and a half cups of cold coconut dropped into hot syrup drops the temperature sharply and thickens the mass at once. Have it measured and ready, stir it through quickly, and pour without delay.
- The panButtered tins means a shallow metal pan; an 8-inch square lined with buttered parchment works and lets you lift the slab out whole. Score the squares while the candy is still warm and pliable -- once fully hard it will only break at random.
- YieldAbout a pound of candy; the number of pieces depends on the pan and the thickness of the slab. Store in a tin between layers of waxed paper; humidity will make the surface tacky within a day or two in an open dish.
Butterscotch belongs to the family of British boiled brown-sugar-and-butter sweets that spread through American cookbooks in the nineteenth century; the name is generally traced to Yorkshire, and the "scotch" is often said to refer to scoring or scotching the slab into squares rather than to Scotland, though neither explanation is firmly documented. The coconut here marks the recipe as distinctly turn-of-the-century American: dried shredded coconut became a cheap, shelf-stable pantry staple in the United States in the last decades of the 1800s, and cookbooks of the period worked it into cakes, pies, macaroons and candies with some enthusiasm. The spelling "cocoanut" was standard well into the twentieth century. Candy-making sections like this one assumed a cook who could judge sugar by eye and by the cold-water test -- the household thermometer was still a specialist tool, and the sequence of stages from thread to hard-crack was knowledge passed on rather than measured.