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Hard Candies: Butterscotch
Butterscotch I 1 1/3 cups brown sugar 2 teaspoons vinegar 2/3 cup butter 2/3 cup hot water 1/2 tablespoon vanilla Put sugar, vinegar, butter, and water in saucepan. Stir until ingredients are mixed, bring to boiling point, and boil without stirring to 290 degrees F., or until candy becomes brittle when tried in cold water. Add vanilla, remove from fire, pour into a buttered pan, cool slightly, and mark in squares. Butterscotch II 1/2 cup corn syrup 1 1/3 cups sugar 2/3 cup light brown sugar 1/2 cup butter 2/3 cup cold water 1/2 tablespoon vanilla Put ingredients, except vanilla, in saucepan, and boil to 288 degrees F., or until it cracks when tried in cold water. Add vanilla, turn into buttered tin, cool slightly, and mark in squares.
Scotch Mallows Dip marshmallows (whole or cut in halves) in Butterscotch I or II, while it is still soft. Take up with two-tined fork, and put on buttered marble slab or tin sheet.
Butterscotch Squares 1 2/3 cups light brown sugar 1 1/2 tablespoons butter 2/3 cup corn syrup 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup water Oil of lemon Put sugar, corn syrup, and water in saucepan, stir until sugar is dissolved, bring to boiling point, and boil to 280 degrees F., or until it cracks in cold water.
Add butter and salt, and boil to 290 degrees F., or until it reaches the hard crack when tried in cold water. Remove from fire, flavor with oil of lemon, and pour out between bars on slightly moistened slab, mark in squares, and break up when cold.
Butterscotch Wafers 1 2/3 cups sugar 1/3 cup corn syrup 1/2 cup water 1 1/2 tablespoons butter 1/2 tablespoon dark molasses 1/4 teaspoon salt Few drops oil of lemon Put sugar, corn syrup, and water in saucepan, stir until dissolved, bring to boiling point, and boil to 270 degrees F., or until it is brittle when tried in cold water. Add butter and molasses, and cook to 280 degrees F., or until it cracks in cold water, stirring to prevent burning. While stirring, move the spoon over every part of the bottom of the kettle. Be careful not to stir in just one spot, thus allowing the candy to burn on the other side of the saucepan. Remove from fire, add salt, flavor with oil of lemon, and drop from tip of spoon on oiled marble slab or tin sheet in wafers the size of a quarter of a dollar.
Four related butterscotch formulas plus a marshmallow dip, all hanging on the thermometer. Read the temperatures first, because 10 degrees is the difference between a chewy toffee and a clean snap.
- The hinge: pull at the stated temperatureThese formulas finish between 280 and 290F, the point this book itself calls the hard crack (modern candy charts usually put hard crack a little higher, nearer 300F), and sugar climbs quickly through it. Have the buttered pan ready before you start, and lift the pan off the heat the moment the thermometer reads the number; carryover heat in a heavy pan will add several degrees on its own.
- Calibrate the thermometerThese recipes were written for sea level. Check your thermometer in boiling water: if it reads other than 212F, shift every target temperature by the same amount. A digital probe or candy thermometer clipped to the side, bulb submerged but off the bottom, is the whole game.
- The cold-water testDrop a little syrup into a cup of cold water. At 280F it forms threads that crack but bend slightly; at 290-300F they snap clean and shatter. Change the water between tests, since warm water reads soft.
- Oil of lemonThis is lemon essential oil, far stronger than lemon extract, and it is called for in drops for a reason. Use food-grade citrus oil and start with two or three drops per batch; if you substitute extract you will need roughly a teaspoon and the flavor will be duller.
- Butter and separationIn Butterscotch I and II the butter goes in at the start and the mixture will look broken as it boils. That is normal, but do not stir once boiling in recipe I, as the recipe directs. Butterscotch Squares and Wafers add butter late; the Wafers recipe is the one that calls for stirring -- sweep the spoon across the entire pan bottom as instructed, since butter and molasses scorch fast.
- Sugars and syrupsBrown sugar carries the flavor in the first three formulas; corn syrup is insurance against crystallization. Golden syrup can replace corn syrup by volume, and will darken the flavor a little.
- Marking and breakingScore the slab with an oiled knife when the surface has set but the sheet still gives under pressure. Wait too long and it will shatter randomly instead of along the lines.
- Scotch MallowsDip while the candy is still fluid, working fast, and keep the pan warm over the lowest heat or in a water bath. Let the candy cool well down from the boil before dipping, or the marshmallows will slump.
- Yield and storageEach batch makes roughly a pound of candy, more for the larger formulas. Butterscotch is hygroscopic: wrap pieces individually in waxed paper and keep them airtight, and avoid making it on a humid day, when it will turn tacky within hours.
Butterscotch appears in English cookery by the middle of the nineteenth century, and Doncaster in Yorkshire has long claimed it as a local product; the "scotch" is sometimes said to come from the sense of scoring or scotching the cooled sheet into squares rather than from Scotland, though this is only one folk etymology among several — others point to "scorched" or to Scotland itself — and the argument has never been settled. What is distinctive is the butter and brown sugar together, giving a caramelized, faintly acidic sweetness that plain boiled sugar cannot; the two teaspoons of vinegar in the first recipe are there partly for tang and partly as an acid that inverts a little of the sugar and keeps the candy from turning grainy. That this book gives four versions, three of them leaning on corn syrup, marks it as an American book of the early twentieth century, when cheap glucose syrup had made hard candy reliable enough for home cooks to attempt without a confectioner's training. The Scotch Mallow is a period novelty of the same moment, when factory marshmallows had just become something you bought by the bag rather than whipped from gum arabic yourself.