Home › Candy Making › Butter Scotch (One pound of pale brown sugar)
Butter Scotch (One pound of pale brown sugar)
One pound of pale brown sugar, one-fourth pound of butter, one-half cupful of water. Boil this until it hardens when dropped into cold water. Add a few drops essence of lemon.
A three-ingredient boiled sugar candy that depends entirely on hitting the right temperature. The one line that matters is "until it hardens when dropped into cold water" — that is the hard-crack stage, and everything else is detail.
- Weights into cupsOne pound of pale brown sugar is about 2 1/4 cups, packed — use light brown, not dark, or the molasses flavour swamps the butter. A quarter pound of butter is one standard stick, 4 oz / 113 g.
- The cold-water test in numbers"Hardens when dropped into cold water" is imprecise; most likely it means the hard-crack stage, around 300–310F (149–154C) on a candy thermometer, though a cook working by feel might stop anywhere from hard ball upward. At hard crack the drizzled syrup sets into threads that snap rather than bend; stopped at the ball stages below 250F the finished candy stays tacky and chewy.
- Essence of lemonPeriod "essence of lemon" is an alcoholic lemon extract, close to what is sold as lemon extract today. A few drops is literal — 1/4 teaspoon is plenty for a pound of sugar. Add it off the heat, since the alcohol and volatile oil flash off in a boiling syrup.
- StirringStir only until the sugar dissolves and the butter melts. After that leave it alone and wash any crystals down the pan side with a wet brush; agitating a hot saturated syrup is what turns butterscotch grainy.
- Pan and vesselUse a heavy saucepan several times the volume of the syrup; buttered sugar foams up hard as it boils. The mixture reaches close to 300F, hot enough to soften or deform plastic utensils.
- Setting and scoringPour at once onto a buttered marble slab or into a buttered 8-inch square pan, to a depth of about a quarter inch. Score into squares with an oiled knife when the surface has set but the slab is still warm; wait until cold and it will shatter along its own lines instead of yours.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 1 1/4 lb of candy, about forty small pieces. Wrap in waxed paper or keep airtight — boiled sugar draws water from the air and goes sticky within a day in a humid kitchen. Avoid making it on a wet day altogether.
Butterscotch is generally traced to Yorkshire in the mid-nineteenth century, with Doncaster the town traditionally named as its home; the origin of the "scotch" is uncertain, with rival suggestions including "to scotch," meaning to score or cut, since the cooled sheet was marked into squares before it hardened, as well as "scorched" and a connection to Scotland. Recipes like this one belong to the candy-making chapters found in American household manuals around 1900, when boiled sugar work was ordinary home practice: cheap sugar, a thermometer-free cold-water test any cook could learn by feel, and a short list of flavouring essences — lemon, peppermint, vanilla, rose — sold by the druggist. The lemon here is worth noting, since modern butterscotch is almost always vanilla-scented; the brighter, older flavouring shows how much of the confection's identity rested on the browned butter and sugar themselves.