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Butterscotch
1 cup of butter, 2 cups of sugar, 2 cups of extracted honey, 1 heaping teaspoon of cin- Boil ten minutes, pour into a buttered pan and when cold cut into squares. namon.
A three-ingredient boiled sugar candy of the old school, where the only real variable is how far you take the syrup. A thermometer replaces the ten-minute instruction entirely.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTen minutes means nothing without knowing the pan, the burner and the batch size. Boil to 290-300F on a candy thermometer for a hard, snappy butterscotch; 270-280F gives a chewier, softer piece.
- Honey browns earlyHoney contains fructose, which colours and scorches at a lower temperature than plain sucrose. Use a heavy pan, stir steadily once the mixture thickens, and pull it off the heat the moment it reaches your target.
- Extracted honeyThis simply means honey spun out of the comb rather than sold in the comb, which is ordinary liquid honey today. Any mild variety works; buckwheat or manuka will dominate the butter flavour.
- The panUse a pan at least four times the volume of the ingredients. Butter and honey foam up hard at the boil and a shallow saucepan will overflow.
- Buttered panA quarter-sheet pan or an 8x8 tin, buttered generously or lined with a buttered silicone mat. Parchment can stick to hot candy unless it too is buttered.
- CuttingDo not wait until it is fully cold to score it. Mark the squares with a buttered knife when the surface has set but the slab still gives slightly, then break along the lines once hard.
- CinnamonA heaping teaspoon in this quantity is assertive. Stir it in off the heat so it does not toast in the hot syrup and turn bitter.
- Yield and keepingRoughly two and a half pounds of candy. Wrap individually or layer with waxed paper in an airtight tin; honey candy pulls moisture from the air and the pieces will fuse.
Butterscotch as a boiled sweet is generally traced to Yorkshire in the middle of the nineteenth century, the "scotch" often explained as scoring or cutting the slab rather than any connection with Scotland, though the point is disputed. The honey version here belongs to a strand of American domestic cookery in which honey stands in for refined sugar, and books of this era regularly offer honey substitutions in candies, cakes and preserves.