Butterscotch

Butterscotch is a type of confectionery whose primary ingredients are brown sugar and butter. Other ingredients such as corn syrup, cream, vanilla, and salt are typically part of the recipe also. The ingredients for butterscotch are similar to toffee; the major difference is that the sugar is boiled to the soft crack stage for butterscotch and the hard crack stage for toffee. Butterscotch sauce is often made into a syrup, which is used as a topping for ice cream (particularly sundaes).

The term butterscotch is also often used, such as in the names of recipes, for the flavours brown sugar and butter together where the actual confection butterscotch is not involved, e.g. butterscotch pudding.

Food historians have several theories regarding the name and origin of this confectionery, but none are conclusive. One explanation is the meaning "to cut or score" for the word "scotch", as the confection must be cut into pieces, or "scotched", before hardening.^[1][2] It is also possible that the "scotch" part of its name was derived from the word "scorch".

However, the word was first recorded in Doncaster, in England, where Samuel Parkinson began making the confectionery in 1817. Parkinson's Butterscotch had royal approval and was one of Doncaster's attractions until it ceased production in 1977. The recipe was revived in 2003 when a Doncaster businessman and his wife rediscovered the recipe on an old folded piece of paper inside one of the famous St Leger tins in their cellar.

It is often used as a flavour for items such as dessert sauce, pudding, and biscuits. To that end, it can be bought in "butterscotch chips", made with hydrogenated (solid) fats so as to be similar for baking use to chocolate chips. There are also individually wrapped, translucent sometimes yellow colored hard candies with an artificial butterscotch flavour, which is dissimilar to actual butterscotch.