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Butter Scotch (Boil together two cupfuls)
Boil together two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half cupful of molasses, one cupful of butter, one-third of a cupful of vinegar, one-third of a cupful of water. Cook steadily, until when a little is dropped in cold water, it will snap. Pour it at once into shallow pans; do not have it more than a quarter of an inch thick. Mark into squares before it hardens.
A straightforward hard-crack candy that depends entirely on cooking the syrup far enough. A thermometer removes all the guesswork the original leaves you.
- "It will snap" means hard crackThe cold-water test described here is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F (149-154C). Below that the sheet stays chewy and sticky; much above 310F the sugar begins to darken and turn bitter.
- MeasurementsOne cupful of butter is 8 oz, two sticks — a very high proportion, which is what gives this its short, brittle-then-melting texture. Two cupfuls of granulated sugar is about 14 oz.
- Vinegar is doing real workThe acid inverts some of the sucrose as the syrup boils, which helps keep the finished candy from turning grainy. The recipe does not say which vinegar; a neutral white vinegar will keep the flavour clean.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and can scorch. British readers should reach for black treacle rather than golden syrup.
- Stir and watch the potWith this much butter and molasses the mixture will scorch on the bottom if left alone. Stir with a wooden spoon or heatproof spatula, and use a heavy pan at least twice the volume of the ingredients — it foams up sharply as it boils.
- Prepare the pans firstButter or line the shallow pans before you start boiling. Once the syrup hits hard crack it must be poured immediately, and a quarter-inch layer sets in a couple of minutes.
- Marking the squaresScore with an oiled knife when the surface has set but the slab still gives under pressure, roughly 3-5 minutes after pouring. Leave it longer and it will shatter along its own lines rather than yours.
- Yield and storageAbout 1 1/2 lb of candy, enough for a 9x13 inch pan at the specified thickness. Keep it in an airtight tin between sheets of waxed paper; humidity will make the surface tacky within a day.
Butterscotch is generally traced to Yorkshire in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the older commercial versions — Doncaster butterscotch was the famous one — were hard boiled sheets like this rather than the soft sauce Americans now associate with the name. The "scotch" is usually explained as scoring or scotching the slab into squares, which is exactly the last instruction here, though the etymology has never been settled. By 1900 candy making was a standard chapter in American household manuals: sugar was cheap, thermometers were not yet common in home kitchens, and the cold-water test appears throughout these recipes as the way of judging a syrup.