rsc

Readers of my Usenet postings will recognize the above as one of my rotating .sig quotes, and it is in fact the last sentence of the Settlement Cookbook's recipe for Rum Balls, which we make every December. It's a pretty straightforward recipe, involving crushed vanilla wafers, pecans, cocoa, corn syrup, rum (duh), and confectioner's sugar (duh again).

A recurring problem -- not sufficiently recurring that we actually remember from year to year to correct for it -- is that they sometimes come out too wet, and even after leaving them out for many hours they're not really dry enough, which means they have a tendency to stick together in the crock in which we store them. I have this idea that last year this didn't happen, and I think it might be because we were a little short on corn syrup (or I neglected to multiply the corn syrup when adjusting for the fact that a box of vanilla wafers is usually more than half a pound).

Anyway, somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that last year we said "Now we know the secret of getting them dry enough."

Well, knowing something and remembering it are two different things. So yesterday, after we had finally given up and stored them even though they weren't really dry enough (and sure enough, they're sticking together), I took down the cookbook again, turned to the recipe, and wrote "(less)" firmly on the line for the corn syrup.