The regional table / Iowa
Scotcheroos
There is exactly one instruction in the original that matters, and it is three words long: do not overcook.
This bar is younger than any public-domain cookbook, so there is no old edition to go to and this page does not pretend otherwise. What there is instead is better suited to the dish: the recipe comes down through reader-contributed newspaper pages and church and 4-H collections, signed by the women who cooked it. The Boone News-Republican of 3 September 1970 gave a whole page to recipes sent in by its readers, and in among Fanci-Filled Cookies from Mrs Selma Estrem of Kelley, Gumdrop Bar Cookies from Mrs Sidney Stumbo of Boone, Crispies from Mrs Kenneth Carlson of Stratford and Wacky Cake from Mrs Mildred Blair of Dayton, it printed this, under the heading SCOTCHEROOS and the name of Mrs Mike Lynch of Boone: one cup sugar, one cup white syrup, one cup peanut butter, six cups rice krispies. "In heavy saucepan cook sugar and syrup until it comes to a full boil. Do not overcook. Remove from heat and blend in peanut butter. Then add rice Krispies; mix until well coated. Press into a buttered 9x13 inch pan. Then cover with topping." The topping is a six-ounce package of chocolate chips and a six-ounce package of butterscotch chips, melted over a double boiler — "Do not let water boil" — and spread over the top. That is the whole architecture, and the ratios below are hers.
Two things are worth saying about what the archives do not contain. The cereal is the base of the bar, and the cereal is a branded product, but no printing by any cereal company could be opened from here — the dated Iowa printings that can be read treat the cereal as an ingredient rather than as a sponsor. The 1970 page writes it in lower case, as a kitchen noun. When the Ames Daily Tribune reprinted a version on 4 May 1988, in a page of microwave recipes for children, it called them Chocolate Scotcheroos and specified "6 cups dry cereal (Rice Krispies, Crispex or other cereal)", with no company credited anywhere on the page. And the name itself is late in the Iowa press: across the whole of the Boone, Carroll, Cedar Rapids, Ames and Ottumwa archives the 1970 Boone page is the only occurrence before the mid-1980s, after which it turns up everywhere at once. So the bar travelled the way this kind of recipe always travels — hand to hand, on cards, in a church cookbook, in a 4-H record book — and reached print late because print was never how it moved.
Why this version works
Peanut butter goes in off the heat. Away from the burner the residual heat is enough to loosen it into the syrup without cooking the fat out. Stirred into a boiling pan it seizes, splits and leaves an oily film on top of the bars a day later.
Corn syrup, not all granulated sugar. Corn syrup is largely glucose and it physically gets in the way of sucrose crystals lining up. That is why the bar stays chewy for days instead of turning to sugar sand — and it is why substituting honey or maple syrup changes the texture as much as the flavour.
Chocolate and butterscotch in equal weight. Butterscotch chips alone are sweet enough to be tiring and set soft; chocolate alone sets hard and hides the peanut. Half and half melts to a topping that firms without shattering and tastes of both — the name is in that half.
The syrup is brought to a boil and taken straight off. The three words in the 1970 printing carry the whole recipe. A full boil dissolves the sugar and thickens the syrup just enough to coat; thirty seconds more and it climbs into soft-crack, and the bars set into something that cracks a tooth. Watch the pan, not the clock.
