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Butterscotch
1 cup Karo, Red Label 1 cup Karo, Blue Label 2 cups granulated sugar 4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons cream or top milk 1/3 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Combine the Karos, sugar, butter and cream and boil, stirring frequently, to 258 degrees F., or when the mixture is brittle if a little is tried in cold water. Add the vanilla and salt, pour into a shallow oiled pan, and cut in squares while still warm.
A corn-syrup company booklet recipe, which means the ingredient list is really an advertisement. It converts easily, but the temperature and the doneness test in the original do not agree with each other.
- Trust the thermometer, not the water test258F is the upper hard-ball stage, which gives a firm but chewy butterscotch that can be cut in squares. Syrup at that temperature will not be brittle in cold water; brittle means hard crack, 300F and above. Follow the number, or you will overshoot into hard candy.
- Stir, but gentlyStirring frequently at these temperatures risks throwing sugar crystals back into the batch and turning it grainy. Wash the pan sides down with a wet brush early on, then keep the motion slow and steady once the butter is in so it does not separate and scorch.
- Cream or top milkTop milk is the cream layer that rose in unhomogenized bottled milk, roughly the fat of today's half-and-half. Two tablespoons of heavy cream or half-and-half both work.
- Pan and cuttingA shallow oiled pan means an 8-inch square for a candy about half an inch thick; a 9-inch pan gives thinner, snappier pieces. Score the squares while the slab is still warm and pliable, then break along the lines once cold.
- SaltA third of a teaspoon is a fussy old measurement. A rounded quarter teaspoon of fine salt is close enough, and butterscotch takes a little more salt happily.
- Yield and keepingRoughly sixty one-inch squares, something over two pounds of candy. Wrap pieces individually in waxed paper; unwrapped butterscotch pulls moisture from humid air and turns sticky.
Butterscotch as a named confection is generally traced to nineteenth-century Yorkshire, and Doncaster in particular, where it was sold in hard slabs; the "scotch" is often said to come from scotching, or scoring, the cooled sheet so it could be snapped into pieces, though the etymology has never been settled. What is certain is why this version reads as it does. Karo corn syrup came onto the American market at the start of the twentieth century, and its makers issued recipe booklets over many years in which the formulas call for their product by name, often by specific label and in substantial quantity. Recipes like this one helped establish corn syrup as a routine ingredient in home-boiled sweets, and there is sound chemistry behind the pitch: glucose syrup interferes with sucrose crystallization, so a beginner's butterscotch comes out smooth rather than sandy.