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Dessert

Butter Scotch

A simple confection made by boiling butter, sugar, and water until thick, then cooling and cutting into squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Butter Scotch

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the scotch

  1. Combine butter, sugar, and water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil the mixture until it thickens.

Set and cut

  1. Pour the thickened mixture onto a buttered dish.

  2. Allow to cool and cut into 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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour, and helps give the candy a smooth, tender bite.
Sugar
Sweetens the candy and, as it cooks, sets into a firm, brittle-to-chewy texture.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it cooks evenly before the mixture thickens.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture until it thickens. Sugar must reach the right concentration to set firmly once cooled. Stopping too early leaves a soft, sticky result, while cooking too long can make it hard or scorched.

“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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