“Charmian was troubled to decide what was truly Bohemian to eat, when they became hungry over their work. She provided candy and chocolate in all their forms and phases, but all girls ate candy and chocolate, and they were so missish, and so indistinctive, and they both went so badly with tea, which she must have because of the weird effect of the spirit-lamp under the kettle, that she disused them after the first week. There remained always crackers, which went with anything, but the question was what to have with them. Their natural association with cheese was rejected because Charmian said she should be ashamed to offer Mr. Ludlow those insipid little Neufchatel things, which were made in New Jersey, anyway, and the Gruyere smelt so, and so did Camembert; and pine-apple cheese was Philistine. There was nothing for it but olives, and though olives had no savor of originality, the little crescent ones were picturesque, and if you picked them out of the bottle with the end of a brush-handle, sharpened to a point, and the other person received them with their thumb and finger, the whole act was indisputably Bohemian.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
One cupful of molasses, two cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of milk, one-half pound of chocolate, a piece of butter half the size of an egg. Boil the milk and molasses together, scrape the chocolate fine, and mix with just enough of the boiling milk and molasses to moisten; rub it perfectly smooth, then, with the sugar, stir into the boiling liquid; add the butter, and boil twenty minutes. Try as molasses candy, and if it hardens, pour into a buttered dish. Cut the same as nut candy.
Sources: The passage is from William Dean Howells, The Coast of Bohemia, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Parloa, Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes and Home Made Candy Recipes of 1909, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — burgundy cloth, cheese stamp.