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Butter Scotch
1 cup sugar ¼ cup molasses ½ cup butter 1 tablespoon vinegar 2 tablespoons boiling water Boil ingredients together until, when tried in cold water, mixture will become brittle. Turn into a well buttered pan; when slightly cool, mark with a sharp-pointed knife in squares. This candy is much improved by cooking a small piece of vanilla bean with other ingredients.
A hard-crack candy of four ingredients, and the whole thing turns on the temperature you take it to. The quantities as printed have suffered in transcription, so read the fractions with suspicion.
- The fractionsThe printed page gives a quarter cup of molasses and half a cup of butter, which is what the text now reads. That proportion of butter to sugar sets firm and brittle.
- Cold-water test in degrees"Brittle" in cold water is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. A drop should shatter rather than bend; anything under about 290F gives you chewy toffee that goes sticky within a day.
- Molasses, not blackstrapPeriod molasses means what is now sold as light or full-flavour unsulphured molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and will dominate the butter entirely.
- Why the vinegar is thereThe acid inverts some of the sucrose as it cooks, which keeps the syrup from crystallising into a grainy mass. Do not leave it out. Stir only as much as is needed to keep the butter and molasses from catching on the bottom.
- Pan and depthA buttered 8-inch square pan gives a slab about a quarter inch thick, which is right. Metal, not glass, so it cools evenly and does not crack from the thermal shock.
- Marking, not cuttingScore the squares while the sheet is still warm and pliable, as the recipe's "slightly cool" directs. Wait too long and it will only break along its own fault lines.
- The vanilla beanSplit the small piece of bean and add it with the other ingredients, then fish it out before pouring. Extract added at the end works too, but off the heat, or the alcohol carries most of the aroma away.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a pound of candy, or roughly 36 small squares. Store between layers of waxed paper in a tin; humidity will make the surface tacky within a day or two.
Butterscotch is generally traced to Yorkshire in the early nineteenth century, and the "scotch" is sometimes explained as scotching, that is scoring, the cooled sheet into squares before it sets hard, though other explanations have been proposed, including "scorched" and a Scottish connection. On that reading, the instruction to mark the slab with a sharp-pointed knife would be the operation the name describes. Thermometers existed but were not assumed in a domestic kitchen, so the cold-water test carried the whole recipe.