Home › Confections › Butter Scotch
Butter Scotch
Two cupfuls brown sugar, butter size of an egg, 2 tbsp. water. Remember not to stir it one bit. A FRIEND.
A three-line candy recipe that assumes the cook already knows how to boil sugar. The quantities are workable; everything omitted is a matter of temperature and timing.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure for roughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Butter of the period was often salted, which suits the finished candy.
- The no-stirring ruleThis is the hinge of the recipe. Once the sugar has dissolved and the syrup boils, stirring drags sugar crystals down from the sides of the pan and seeds the whole batch grainy. Swirl the pan if you must move it, and wash stray crystals off the sides with a wet pastry brush.
- How far to cook itThe original gives no doneness cue at all. For brittle butterscotch that snaps, boil to the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer; for a chewier sweet, stop at the soft-crack stage, around 275-285F. Without a thermometer, test by dropping a little syrup into cold water.
- Pan choiceUse a heavy saucepan several times the volume of the syrup. Butter and sugar climb sharply as the water boils off, and a thin pan scorches brown sugar long before it reaches temperature.
- Brown sugarLight or dark both work, though dark gives a more molasses-forward result and browns faster. Modern brown sugar is refined white sugar with molasses added back, somewhat milder than the less-refined product a 1900s cook would have bought.
- Setting and breakingPour into a buttered shallow pan or rimmed sheet. Score it into squares with an oiled knife while it is still pliable, after two or three minutes, then break along the lines once cold. Waiting too long means shattering it at random.
- Yield and keepingTwo cups of sugar plus the butter makes roughly a pound of candy, enough for a small plateful. Wrap the pieces or store them airtight; butterscotch turns tacky in humid air.
Butterscotch is generally traced to Yorkshire in the mid-1800s, and the second half of the name is of uncertain origin: one proposal derives it from "scotch" in the sense of to score or cut, the marks a confectioner makes so the cooled slab breaks into neat squares, though others point to "scorched" or to a Scottish connection. It belongs to the family of boiled sugar sweets that home cooks took up once refined sugar became cheap, and cookbooks like this one are full of them: cheap ingredients, no special equipment beyond a pan, and a result children would eat. The attribution to "A FRIEND" is characteristic of the compiled cookbook, where contributors were named, initialed, or left deliberately anonymous, and the terseness is characteristic too, since these books were written by cooks for cooks who needed a reminder rather than a lesson.