Once upon a time, butterscotch was the darling of the American sweet tooth, casting its golden glow over puddings, pies, sauces, candies, cake frostings - you name it.
Now there are folks who never have had so much as a single, sorry mouthful of instant butterscotch pudding.
This must be an oversight, America. Sure, maybe your doctor doesn't want you to eat too much of it (your dentist, either), but fresh butterscotch is overwhelmingly rich, mellow and seductive. Flavorwise, it's the boss.
In my ill-informed youth, the only butterscotch I knew was either a sauce or a pudding. When I first encountered butterscotch balls, I remember thinking, "Hey, cool, they've figured a way to make a butterscotch-flavored candy."
Actually, I had it backward. Butterscotch candy had come first - the butterscotch flavor develops naturally when you boil sugar syrup and butter together to a high enough temperature to make hard candy.
It's a combination of two flavors: browned sugar, otherwise known as caramel, and browned butter. The latter results from what chemists call the Maillard reaction, in which sugars and proteins react under heat to create roasted and browned flavors.
This is why butterscotch has so often been combined with other roasted ingredients. Nuts, such as pecans, are typically roasted; rum and bourbon contain caramel; maple syrup has undergone the Maillard reaction.
If anything is certain about butterscotch, it's that this flavor was not created by design. It was a byproduct of a technique that made candy-making just about foolproof, even for people who weren't skilled confectioners.
The problem in candy-making is that once syrup has been heated higher than about 250 degrees, its natural inclination is to "seize up" as it cools, turning into rock-hard crystals rather than brittle, glassy candy. In the 17th century, French candy-makers had discovered that fat has the handy property of getting in the way of crystallization.
Acid ingredients accomplish much the same thing by breaking some of the sucrose molecules into glucose and fructose sugar, thereby cluttering up the solution for would-be crystals. (In the 18th century, adding an acid such as cream of tartar to sugar syrup was called "greasing" it.)
This is one reason for all the many sweet-sour hard candies, such as lemon drops and Life Savers. Probably it also explains why a lot of old-time butterscotch recipes call for a little vinegar or lemon juice, and maybe even how a bit of lemon peel flavor came to be traditional in English butterscotch candies.
Molasses retards crystallization, too, by altering the ratio of glucose to fructose. Conveniently for butterscotch makers, molasses contains caramel and even some roasted Maillard-reaction flavors of its own because it's the byproduct of the repeated boiling by which sugar is refined. In effect, it's a very dark caramel with a distinct burnt edge and a bit of sharpness.
Because molasses is so strongly flavored, butterscotch recipes rarely use it straight, only in the diluted form of brown sugar, which basically is refined sugar crystals thinly coated with molasses.
A really cautious (or insecure) candy-maker might throw all these things into the mix: butter, an acid ingredient and molasses. As it happens, until highly refined sugar became inexpensive in the middle of the 19th century, most sugar - certainly the sort of sugar ordinary people had access to - was more or less brown, so the molasses issue pretty much took care of itself.
Why don't many people make butterscotch sauce or pudding today⢠Particularly if you don't trouble to cook the butter to the point of browning (around 240 degrees), as some recipes don't, it's a splashy effect with relatively little risk of failure. Butterscotch is forgiving.
Just how forgiving is plain from the wildly differing proportions of ingredients in butterscotch sauce recipes. With fudge or fondant, the proportions always must be about the same, but the ratio of sugar to butter in butterscotch recipes can range from 4-to-3 to 16-to-1 and the ratio of sugar to cream from 8-to-9 to 4-to-1.
In short, you could practically forget about using any recipe at all and just boil a bunch of brown sugar with some butter for a while, add cream and then boil until it was as thick as you liked.
Don't worry. It'd be some kind of butterscotch sauce. Butterscotch rules, but it's not exactly rocket science.
| Recipes for true butterscotch lovers |
Here's a butterscotch sauce flavored with freshly made caramel instead of molasses. The caramel emphasizes the flavor of the lightly browned butter. The sauce has a tendency to separate and granulate when cold, so it should be warmed up and stirred well before using.
Take care to avoid splashing any candy mixture onto your skin, because it can cause severe burns.
The recipe is from "Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making," by James Peterson (John Wiley & Sons, $44.95).
Caramel Butterscotch Sauce
Place the sugar in a small, heavy saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves, then cook without stirring for 10 to 15 minutes until it is a deep reddish-brown.
Pour in 1 cup of water and stand back to avoid the steam and splatter. Wait 1 minute, then add the remaining 1 cup of water and boil, stirring occasionally, for 5 to 8 minutes, until any hardened caramel has melted.
Add the butter and boil for about 15 minutes, until the mixture reaches 245 degrees on a candy thermometer (the coating on a spoon dipped into the mixture and then in cold water will have a gummy consistency).
Stir in the cream and vanilla and simmer until the mixture reaches the desired consistency (it should flow smoothly almost in a continuous drip off the spoon). This should take 2 to 5 minutes. Let cool, then refrigerate until use.
Makes 2 cups.
Nutrition information per tablespoon : 88 calories, 4 grams fat (2 grams saturated), 10 milligrams cholesterol, 0 grams protein, 14 grams carbohydrates, 0 grams dietary fiber, 30 milligrams sodium.
This luscious, mouth-filling sauce keeps well in the refrigerator but should be taken out an hour ahead or briefly zapped in the microwave to soften it before use. The recipe is from "Ladies Home Journal Dessert Cookbook," edited by Carol Truax (Doubleday, 1964).
Rum Butterscotch Sauce
Place the sugar, corn syrup and butter in a small, heavy saucepan and boil for about 15 minutes over medium-high heat until the mixture reaches 245 degrees (the coating on a spoon dipped into the mixture and then in cold water will have a gummy consistency).
Stir in the cream, return to a boil and simmer until thickened, for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla and rum. Let cool and then refrigerate until use.
Makes about 2 cups.
Nutrition information per tablespoon: 114 calories, 4 grams fat (3 grams saturated), 13 milligrams cholesterol, 0 grams protein, 19 grams carbohydrates, 0 grams dietary fiber, 46 milligrams sodium.
This recipe, which the Los Angeles Times' Food section voted as one of its 10 best in 1990, is based on the one used at Wolfgang Puck's former restaurant Eureka. Adding coffee gives it a flavor like coffee candy; adding maple gives it an overpowering perfume.
Butterscotch Pudding
Combine the butter and brown sugar in a saucepan over low heat. Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring. Add the cream and stir until smooth.
Combine the cornstarch and salt in a bowl. Stir in the milk until the cornstarch dissolves. Add the cornstarch mixture to the saucepan and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring constantly to prevent burning, until the mixture thickens.
Whisk 1 cup of the mixture into the egg yolks, then return to the pan. Add the vanilla and optional espresso or maple syrup. Reduce the heat to low and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.
Strain and pour into 8 custard cups. Serve warm or cold.
Makes 8 servings.
Nutrition information per serving: 468 calories, 25 grams fat (15 grams saturated), 185 milligrams cholesterol, 5 grams protein, 58 grams carbohydrates, trace of dietary fiber, 260 milligrams sodium.
| Be meticulous with molasses |
Molasses isn't just caramelized sugar and browned proteins.
"There are a lot of minerals, mostly calcium and iron," says food scientist and author Harold McGee. "They don't participate in any aromatic compounds themselves, but they influence the direction of reactions and give a distinctive spectrum of flavors.
"And besides sucrose, there are larger sugars, three- and four-unit sugars, which don't have much sweetness but react with each other and the smaller sugars, giving flavorful compounds."
Finally, there are amino acids from protein breakdown, which give molasses its sharpness.
Because of the acids, molasses or even brown sugar will make milk curdle if you boil it with either of them. For this reason, many recipes for butterscotch sauce, and particularly for butterscotch pudding, begin by cooking the brown sugar with butter before adding cream or milk, especially milk.
"This doesn't actually prevent coagulation," McGee says, "but it makes it less noticeable. The fat will disperse the coagulating milk proteins so they don't link up to make larger clots."
One absolute way to prevent curdling in a butterscotch pudding would be to use granulated sugar instead of brown sugar and then whisk in a little molasses at the very end, when it's thickened. Start with 1/4 teaspoon per cup of sugar and add more to taste.
You also can also use granulated sugar and a little molasses in place of brown sugar if you don't have brown sugar on hand.
