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Dessert

Butter-scotch

A hard candy made from sugar, water, vinegar, butter, lemon extract, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Butter-scotch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar, water, vinegar (or cream of tartar), and butter.

  2. Boil the mixture without stirring until it reaches a hard crack stage.

  3. Just before removing from heat, add the baking soda.

Set and mark

  1. Pour the mixture into well-buttered biscuit tins, spreading it to a thickness of ¼ inch.

  2. When it is partly cold, mark it into 1-inch squares.

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. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Vinegar + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Forms the brittle candy base that sets hard as it cools.
Vinegar or cream of tartar
Acid that helps keep the sugar from crystallising, giving a smooth, brittle texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the hot acidic syrup to add gas, making the candy light and crisp.
Butter
Adds richness and a soft, buttery flavour to the candy.

The step that matters

Boil without stirring to hard crack stage. Stirring can trigger sugar crystallisation, leaving a grainy candy, and stopping short of hard crack leaves it sticky instead of brittle. Reaching the right temperature controls how much water remains, which sets the final texture.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, butter. 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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