How is butterscotch made?

Butterscotch is a sweet whose main ingredients are brown sugar and butter. Some recipes add cream, vanilla and salt, and the earliest known recipes, from mid 19th century Yorkshire, used treacle instead of sugar, or as well as it: see butterscotch.

How it is made

1. Melt and mix. Brown sugar and butter, with treacle or cream if the recipe uses them, are heated together.
2. Boil to soft crack. The mixture is boiled to the soft crack stage, 132 to 143°C, where the syrup is about 95 per cent sugar.
3. Set. It is poured out to cool and set, and cut or broken into pieces.

Soft crack, not hard crack

Butterscotch is similar to toffee, but the sugar is boiled only to the soft crack stage, not the hard crack stage. Toffee goes on to 149 to 154°C: see how is toffee made? Butterscotch and toffee are closer relations than either is to caramel, since both use brown sugar or molasses while caramel uses white sugar: see what is the difference between toffee and caramel?

A Doncaster recipe from 1848

Early mentions of butterscotch link it with Doncaster in Yorkshire. An 1848 issue of the Liverpool Mercury printed a recipe for Doncaster butterscotch: one pound of butter, one pound of sugar and a quarter of a pound of treacle, boiled together. That is about 500 g each of butter and sugar and 125 g of treacle. By 1851, Doncaster butterscotch was being sold by rival confectioners S. Parkinson and Sons, Henry Hall, and Booth's, and the original Parkinson recipe is still made today. In 1855, a glossary of Yorkshire words described butterscotch as a treacle ball with butter mixed into it.

Why scotch?

Nobody is sure. One theory says scotch means to cut or score, because the sweet has to be cut into pieces, or scotched, before it hardens. Another says the word comes from scorch.

Sauce, chips and discs

• Butterscotch sauce is made from brown sugar cooked to 116°C, mixed with butter and cream.
• Butterscotch chips for baking are made with hydrogenated fats, so that they behave like chocolate chips.
• Butterscotch discs, the individually wrapped, translucent yellow hard sweets, are often made with an artificial butterscotch flavour.
• Werther's Original, from the German company August Storck, began as a caramel hard sweet. Later versions include soft butterscotch melts, and sugar free versions made with isomalt: see sugar free sweets and polyols

Allergens

Butterscotch is made with butter, and often cream, so it usually contains milk, one of the 14 allergens: see milk in sweets

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