The Great Cream Butterscotch Debate

The Famous Baby C, always wear your sunglasses to cover puffy eyes!

Long ago and far away, John and Josephine Lander owned a general store. It was located in Lucinda, Pennsylvania. Lucinda, to this day, is no bustling metropolis. It is one of those places you miss if you blink while driving through. It is not a place that you would choose to visit. In fact, getting out of there is probably one of the smartest things my grandparents ever did.

John and Josephine were both of German ancestry, as were most of the occupants of Lucinda. These were pretty humorless people and they had a pretty tough existence. They were lucky enough to own the town store, but that also meant everyone worked in the store. Since they sold candy in their store, Josephine would make homemade candy for the family each Christmas and Easter. This tradition was carried on by her daughter, Hilda (my grandmother).

My father and his two sisters have all continued family tradition. By carrying on the family tradition in their own ways and putting their own stamp on it, a debate has raged for years over who makes the Cream Butterscotch correctly. Susan's is very shiny and smooth. Patrick's is grainy and hard. JoAnna's is very creamy and soft. Perhaps their end product says something about their different personalities? You bet your ass it does!

Well, this year I entered the fray. I have attempted to make the candy previously, but have had little success. I made Cream Butterscotch with my grandmother Hilda that never got firm. It was more like pralines. It tasted fine, but was not the right consistency. Hilda, ever the queen of passing failures off as successes, deemed it taffy-like and wrote me a note of encouragement. She suggested leaving the candy alone for a while to watch a show that Peter Jennings was doing on education in the United States (yeah, this was in the 80s, but it turns out the sentiment was correct).

We had an old fashioned candy thermometer that looked like a thermometer for a farm animal. It had a clip on it that was wildly undependable and could result in all kinds of disasters (molten sugar is REALLY HOT and REALLY DANGEROUS!).



When Mr. Smith and I got married, someone gave us a gift card for Williams Sonoma. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Money to spend on cooking stuff! Yippee! One of the gadgets I bought was a digital, programmable candy/oil thermometer. I have used it for oil and now for candy. It has a clip that is much more reliable and it is far more exact, so you are not guessing at what the temperature is of your candy/oil, which can be a dicey affair.


I can not emphasize enough the importance of a good candy thermometer. My grandmother would tell you that she made candy for years without one. I would tell you that Hilda was and still is the master of selling cooking flops as innovations. Some day, I will tell you the story of the Butterscotch Pie Incident.



Having the right thermometer will take the guesswork out of making the candy. I am the type of person that is really really upset if I screw up a recipe. It bugs me for days and I obsess over it. I feel the need to make it again to prove that I can't be deterred by a failure. I might have a problem in this area.

Lander Cream Butterscotch Candy

1 cup white sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup dark corn syrup
1/2 cup evaporated milk

2 Tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
nuts (optional)

Boil sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, and evaporated milk until it reaches 235° (or soft ball stage). Let the mixture cool, stirring it occasionally to check the consistency. As it cools, it will begin to thicken and become more creamy-looking. Once you see this beginning to happen, you need to stir it until it lightens in color and thickens. Keep stirring until you feel like you are about to die, that is just about when the candy is ready to scoop (I would recommend one of those tiny scooper-deals, you know what they are. Get the smallest one, I believe it is 00 size, whatever the hell that means. It will give you the right size consistently, which is what you want).


Go ahead and scoop it out into individual pieces and nestle a pecan or walnut on top while the candy is still slightly soft. You can put the candy onto wax paper, but I prefer parchment paper.

Now, if you decide to eat some of the candy while it was still warm, that would be perfectly understandable. After all, you might be tired from all that stirring and need a little snack. Just be careful not to get caught!

Hilda's Molasses Sugar Cookies

My grandmother, more specifically, my father's mother, Hilda, is a force of nature.

By the way, I have always wondered, how, in the name of all that is holy, you look at your newborn daughter (your fifth) and decide to name this innocent child Hilda. Never got that one. Ran out of names? Really wanted to give a name that you would only hear in a damn German opera?

Anyway, Hilda is the rock of my father's family. She is the one that loaded the kids and their belongings into a car every summer and drove to whatever small town baseball team had employed Barney (my grandfather).

I can picture her fierce determination, packing the car, making the most of the space they had available, taking all the things that they could not live without during the hot summer. Hurtling toward heaven knew what, her babies in the car, probably just in their underwear since that was before the days of automotive air conditioning. Another small town, another unsuitable apartment over a brothel or funeral parlor, another adventure.

She had to be tough. She was one of 12 children. Esther, Jim, Herb, Bob, John, Millie, Alice, Grace, Hilda, Tom, Eddie, and Pat scattered over a span of 25 years.

She wanted to get out of Lucinda. One of the nuns told her when she was a girl that the best thing she could do is get the heck out that town. Hilda really took that one to heart.

Hilda wanted out. Out of Lucinda, out of the ceaseless intermarriage, small town-ness that Lucinda still hasn't shaken off.

He had a one-way ticket. He did not intend to come back and that was all she needed to hear.

So she married a dreamer. The one guy in Lucinda, PA with a dream and a one-way train ticket. He didn't want to be a farmer or a miner. He wanted something completely off the map. He wanted to play baseball.

He took his one-way ticket and what little money he had. He didn't have enough to make it back, so it was sink or swim time. He swam.

And they were on their way.

He got a contract with the St. Louis Browns. He eventually became a manager/coach for a multitude of minor league teams. In the off season he would take whatever job would get them through the winter until the season started up again.


Barney in the dugout, one of many.


This was a time when there were no million dollar signing bonuses. You were lucky if you kept your gig from one season to the next. Where Barney was, there was no glamor, no glitz, no shine. Their's was not a charmed life, but they made a living.

Each winter, he would get a contract, skim it quickly and hurl it into the corner. There it would sit until he was ready to read it again and consider signing it. He always did. He could not stay away.

Watch Bull Durham and you will get a taste of what his life was like. What their lives were like.

He would go to Spring Training in Paris, Texas or Bluefield, West Virginia or any one of a thousand places that had a baseball team. Once school finished for the children (there were eventually four, my father and three sisters) she would follow. Always loyal, always willing to make do, always ready for the adventure, a true pioneer spirit.

This recipe was one of those perennial favorites in the Lutz household. Hilda has a real sweet tooth and likes to have a little something around to indulge it.

This recipe is written exactly as she wrote it on the card. And it is just like her. No flowery descriptions of method. Just the facts.

One time, about a million years ago, we were helping her move. She made sure to have the ice bucket/cookie jar in her car for the trip from one apartment to the other. She very slyly suggested that I check and see if there was anything in the cookie jar.

We ate them while she drove. Speeding forward toward her next adventure.


Hilda's Molasses Sugar Cookies
3/4 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg
2 cups sifted flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. cloves
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. salt

Cream shortening, sugar, molasses and egg. Beat well. Sift together dry ingredients. Mix well, cover, chill. Form into 1 inch balls. Bake 375° for 8-10 minutes.

Oatmeal Cookies

Yesterday (yes, while I was waiting for the bread dough to rise) H and I made Oatmeal Cookies.

He had seen a little girl make them on Sesame Street and was just desperate to make them.

I normally do not possess the patience to embark on such an endeavor. I was able to cook with my adorable, delightful niece, Miss A. She was so good at such an early age. We made cookies for her father (this recipe, in fact, adapted for diabetics). However, trying to bake with my own son required me to summon up all the patience I currently possess. Meaning, not much.

I did better than I thought I would. The cookies got mixed, scooped and baked. All in all, he mostly enjoyed playing in the flour mixture and then playing in the sink.

This recipe is from the cook book that came with my Grandma Hilda's mixer, the infamous "Beater Book." The cookbook you can't keep house without. Do you have one? If so, what is it?

Oatmeal Cookies

2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

In a bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Set aside.

1/2 brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup shortening
2 eggs
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups quick oatmeal

Cream together sugar and shortening. Add eggs, one at a time. Alternate adding the flour mixture and milk, ending with the flour mixture. Fold in the oatmeal at the very end and make sure the dough is well-blended.

At this point, depending on where you stand on the raw egg debate, go ahead (or don't) and eat a nice dollop of dough. You know you want to and it is sooooooo good.

Scoop onto cookies sheets. Place about 2 inches apart.

Bake at 350 for 10 minutes.

Simple, better than store-bought, kid-friendly, makes your house smell great. What more can you ask for from a cookie?