Gibraltar rock (candy)

She first sold her lemon or peppermint flavored hard candy on the steps of the First Church herself, until they became so popular that she was able to purchase a horse and wagon to sell them to neighboring towns.

Ye Olde Pepper Companie continues to sell the candies, apparently using the original recipe as "Gibralters" [sic] and lists sugar, water, cream of tartar, cornstarch, and oil of lemon as ingredients.

[3] A 1947 cookbook[2] gives a recipe using sugar, water, vinegar, and either vanilla, peppermint or cloves for flavoring; it is boiled until hard then pulled like taffy, and becomes "soft and creamy" in several days.

An 1893 book about Salem[4] calls Gibraltars, together with molasses "black-jacks", "two Salem institutions" and says The Gibraltar... is a white and delicate candy, flavored with lemon or peppermint, soft as cream at one stage of its existence, but capable of hardening into a consistency so stony and so unutterably flinty-hearted that it is almost a libel upon the rock whose name it bears.

In the book, a character named Hepzibah Pyncheon operates a little "cent-shop" which contained "a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments of Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable stone foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatly done up in white paper.