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Butter Scotch
2 cups sugar 2 tablespoons water 2 tablespoons butter Boil without stirring until brittle when tested in cold water. Pour out on buttered plates to cool.
A three-ingredient hard candy that lives or dies by temperature. The whole recipe hinges on the cold-water test, which corresponds to a specific reading on a candy thermometer.
- "Brittle when tested in cold water"This is the hard-crack stage: a drop of syrup in cold water sets into threads that snap rather than bend. On a thermometer that is 300-310F. Undercook it and the sheet stays chewy rather than brittle, so the test matters.
- The water is a starter, not an ingredientTwo tablespoons of water to two cups of sugar looks impossibly dry, and it is meant to. The water only dissolves the sugar at the start and boils off within the first minutes; the finished candy is essentially sugar and butter.
- Boil without stirring, and mean itStirring after the sugar dissolves throws crystals onto the pan wall and seeds the whole batch grainy. If crystals appear at the waterline, wash them down with a wet pastry brush rather than agitating the syrup.
- Which sugarThe recipe says only "sugar," and white granulated will give a pale, clear butterscotch. Many period butterscotch recipes call for brown sugar or a spoonful of molasses for the darker colour and flavour; either works here.
- Pan choiceUse a heavy saucepan two to three times the volume of the syrup, since the butter-and-sugar mixture foams up as it boils. A thin pan scorches the bottom before the mass reaches temperature.
- "Buttered plates"A rimmed baking sheet, buttered or lined with a silicone mat, is easier. Pour to about a quarter-inch and score the surface into squares with an oiled knife while it is still warm; once fully cold it shatters wherever it likes.
- Yield and keepingTwo cups of sugar makes roughly a pound of candy, enough to fill part of a large baking sheet at scoring thickness. Store in an airtight tin with waxed paper between layers; hard candy pulls moisture from humid air and turns tacky otherwise.
- Pick a dry daySugar work is unreliable in high humidity. If the kitchen is damp, cook a couple of degrees past your target to compensate.
Butterscotch is generally traced to Yorkshire in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Doncaster in particular claimed it as a local speciality; the "scotch" is more often explained as a reference to scoring or scotching the cooled sheet into squares than to Scotland, though neither account is documented beyond tradition. Recipes of this kind belong to the era when boiled sugar was ordinary domestic work rather than a specialist skill, judged entirely by dropping syrup into a cup of cold water. Butterscotch, needing only sugar, butter and attention, was among the most persuasive proofs that what the confectioner made could be made at home.