Buttercrunch Day

What the day is

Buttercrunch Day is observed on January 20. Buttercrunch is brittle butter toffee with nuts through it, usually almonds, coated in chocolate and often rolled in more chopped nuts.

Origin and background

The confection is a close relative of the toffee marked on January 8, and in American usage the two names overlap heavily, with buttercrunch being what a great deal of so-called English toffee actually is. What distinguishes it is the assembly: the nuts and the chocolate are the definition rather than additions.

The nuts do structural work as well as flavor. Toffee on its own is a solid sheet that shatters into shards, while nut pieces interrupt the sugar glass and give it fault lines, so it breaks into manageable pieces rather than splinters.

Its besetting problem is moisture. Boiled sugar at that concentration pulls water out of the air, and the surface turns tacky, then soft, and the crunch disappears. This happens within a day or two in a humid kitchen and is the single most common complaint about homemade buttercrunch. The chocolate coating is not only flavor; it is a moisture barrier, which is why fully enrobed pieces keep far better than bare ones.

Then there is the name collision. Buttercrunch is also a well-known variety of butterhead lettuce, developed at Cornell and released in the 1960s, valued for tolerating heat without bolting and for a soft-leaved head with a crisp heart. It has nothing whatever to do with the candy, and gardeners and confectioners have been talking past each other about it ever since.

How to take part

• Store it airtight the moment it cools, with as little air in the container as possible.
• Coat it completely in chocolate if you want it to keep more than a couple of days.
• Make it on a dry day. Humidity genuinely decides the outcome.
• Toast the nuts first, which changes the result more than the chocolate does.
• Plant some Buttercrunch lettuce, purely for the joke.