Remember when Grandma tried to keep you quiet during awkward moments with those little yellow butterscotch hard candies that seemed to always be in her purse or the candy dish on the living room table ...

Almost everyone remembers it sitting in a glass candy dish at a grandparent’s house: small, brown, and unmistakably hard.

It was once a darling of a dessert. The very word conjures midcentury moms cheerfully stirring a pot of homemade pudding or of well-scrubbed youngsters ordering it over vanilla ice cream at the soda ...