English Toffee Day

What the day is

English Toffee Day is observed on January 8. The name is doing something slightly dishonest, which is the most interesting thing about it.

Origin and background

Toffee, caramel and butterscotch are made from the same short list of ingredients, and what separates them is almost entirely temperature. Sugar and butter cooked to around 120 degrees Celsius stay soft and chewy, which gives caramel. Taken up to about 150 degrees, the hard crack stage, nearly all the water has boiled away and the result sets brittle. That is toffee. Butterscotch traditionally uses brown sugar and stops between the two.

So the thermometer is the recipe. Twenty degrees decides whether the same pan produces something chewy or something that shatters.

The naming is where it gets muddled. In Britain, toffee usually means the chewy kind, including the dark treacle toffee eaten around bonfire night. What American shops sell as English toffee is generally a brittle buttercrunch studded with almonds and coated in chocolate, which is a fine confection and not what the name would get you in England.

The technical difficulty is keeping the butter and sugar together. Toffee separates into a greasy layer and a sugar layer when the emulsion breaks, usually from a sudden temperature change or from stirring hard late in the cook. A little corn syrup or a few drops of acid discourages the sugar from crystallizing, and steady moderate heat does most of the rest.

How to take part

• Use a thermometer. Judging hard crack by eye is how most attempts fail.
• Stir gently and steadily rather than vigorously once it is hot.
• If it splits, take it off the heat and beat in a spoonful of hot water to bring it back.
• Make the British version too, and taste what the twenty degrees did.
• Keep it dry and airtight. Toffee pulls in moisture and turns sticky fast.