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Dessert

Butter Scotch

A candy made from sugar, butter, cream of tartar, lemon extract, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Butter Scotch

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Combine sugar, butter, cream of tartar, and cold water in a pot.

  2. Boil without stirring until it breaks easily in cold water.

  3. Remove from heat and add lemon extract.

Pour and mark

  1. Butter a dripping pan and pour the mixture to a thickness of ¼ inch.

  2. When partly cold, mark off in squares.

  3. If pulled when partly cold until very white, it will resemble ice cream candy.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Coffee a sugar
Provides the sweet, crystalline base that hardens into the candy.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender bite and rich flavor in the finished candy.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the syrup to help prevent unwanted sugar crystallization.

The step that matters

Boil without stirring until it breaks easily in cold water. Stirring can trigger sugar crystals to form, making the candy grainy. The syrup must reach the right concentration, which is checked by its brittle set in cold water, so the candy hardens properly rather than staying sticky or turning out too soft.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coffee, sugar, butter, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, sugar, butter, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More butter scotch recipes

Pie 26Candy 12brittle 4Filling 3Squares 3 See all 152 →

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