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Butter Scotch Candy
Four cups brown sugar, two of butter, vinegar to taste, two tablespoons water, and a little soda; boil half an hour; drop a little in hot water, and if crisp, it is done.
A four-ingredient hard candy with no temperature and one badly worded test. The proportions work, but the timing and the water test both need correcting before you start.
- Use a thermometer, not the clock"Boil half an hour" depends entirely on your pan and burner; in a wide heavy saucepan the syrup can reach hard-crack in 12-15 minutes. Cook to 300F for a candy that snaps, 290F for one with slight chew, and stop there.
- The water test is cold waterA drop of syrup in hot water tells you nothing, as it simply dissolves. The standard test is a spoonful of ice water: at hard-crack the thread sets brittle and cracks between your fingers.
- Quantities in weightFour cups packed brown sugar is about 1 lb 12 oz; two cups butter is 1 lb, or four American sticks. That is a high proportion of fat by modern standards, and the result may well set softer and more toffee-like than a glassy candy.
- Vinegar to tasteVinegar here is an acid to invert some of the sugar and discourage graining, not a flavouring. One tablespoon of cider vinegar for this batch is plenty; more will read as sour in the finished sweet.
- A little sodaRead this as 1/4 teaspoon, added at the very end off the heat. It neutralises some acid and aerates the mass, which foams up sharply, so use a pan at least three times the depth of the syrup.
- Stirring and separationWith this much butter the fat will try to separate as the syrup climbs past 250F. Stir steadily with a wooden spoon over medium heat rather than boiling it hard and untouched.
- Setting and scoringPour at once into a buttered rimmed sheet pan to about 1/4 inch. Score into squares with an oiled knife when the surface is set but still yields, roughly five minutes; wait longer and it will shatter unevenly.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 lb of candy (the ingredients weigh under 3 lb before evaporation), filling a half-sheet pan. Store between sheets of parchment in a tin; humidity turns the surface sticky within a day or two.
Butterscotch appears in English cookery writing from the middle of the nineteenth century, and the confectioners of Doncaster in Yorkshire are traditionally credited with popularising it, though the claim is more often repeated than documented. The "scotch" has been linked to the older sense of scotching, meaning to score or cut -- which is what this recipe's final step requires -- but the etymology is disputed, and other explanations, including a derivation from "scorched", have been proposed. What marks the sweet as period is the pairing of brown sugar with a large proportion of butter: cheap unrefined sugar and farm butter were both plentiful in North American kitchens, and a candy needing no chocolate, no cream and no cooling marble slab was well within reach of a home cook working over a range. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by local women and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and its candy section reflects that origin: short, informal directions written cook-to-cook, on the assumption that the reader already knew what boiled sugar looked like at the right stage.