Gibraltar rock (candy)
Gibraltar rock, Gibraltars, or Gibralters are a taffy-like candy associated with Salem, Massachusetts.
An 1893 book about Salem[1] 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. The Gibraltar is the aristocrat of Salem confectionery. It gazes upon chocolate and sherbet and says:—"Before you were, I was. After you are not, I shall be."
She says the lemon flavor is preferred by youth, and the peppermint by the elderly, and quotes a "charming old Salem dame" as saying "I know I must be growing old, because a peppermint Gibraltar is so comforting to me."
In Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, written in 1851 and set at about that time, Hepzibah Pyncheon's little "cent-shop" contained[2]
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.
His story "The Old Apple-Dealer," in Mosses from an Old Manse, similarly mentions "that delectable condiment, known by children as Gibraltar rock." According to a 1947 cookbook,[3] Hawthorne wrote in his notebook of their having
been made by an Englishman named Spencer around 1822 and were sold by his mother, who drove a wagon from street to street. Their retail price was a silver penny apiece or four pence, half penny for seven.
The cookbook 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.
A modern candy company[4] offers "Gibralters"[sic] and lists sugar, water, cream of tartar, cornstarch, and oil of lemon as ingredients. They are cut into the shape of a rhombus about 1-1/2 inches on a side.
References
- ^ Eleanor Putnam, ed. Arlo Bates (1893). Old Salem. Houghton Mifflin., p. 63
- ^ Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851). The House of the Seven Gables., Chapter II, "The Little Shop-Window"
- ^ Ella Shannon Bowles and Dorothy S. Towle (1947). Secrets of New England Cooking. Barrows., reprinted 2000 by Dover Publications, p. 288
- ^ Gibralters[sic], Ye Olde Pepper Companie Ltd]