All Things Christmas (5 page)

Making Fruitcake with the Youngsters

Fruitcakes are traditionally served during the Christmas season and so
we
decided to whip up an ancient fruitcake as a yuletide treat. It’s called
Laganum
Fructus
, which is Latin for
Cake of Fruit
or
Cake with Fr
uit
. Fruitcake was quite popular with the soldiers of Rome’s Legions. It was aged with wine and the alcohol preserved the cake
,
prevent
ing
spoilage. Consequently, a Legionnaire could pack his
laganum
fructus
into his
loculus
, a traveling pack or duffel bag, and count on the cake keeping until he finished snacking on it.

This recipe calls for some aging, so it’s best to make it well ahead of when you plan to serve it. Now let’s get something straight. It doesn’t matter whether you love fruitcake or hate the thought of the stuff; gather the kids together and
b
ake one anyway. It’s a good way to make the Biblical era real to your children. As you can tell from the picture above, we gathered a Christian Education Class for a fruitcake making d
emonstration.

There are two distinct styles of fruitcakes, cakey and fruity. The recipe definitely leans to the fruity side of things. That is, it’s a lot of fruit held together with a little bit of dough. The recipe for this fruitcake consisted of four primary ingredients: pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, dried fruits, and barley flour. The first hurdle you’ll encounter is how to soften pomegranate seeds to the point where they can be chewed without the risk of breaking a tooth. An easy way to circumvent this is to substitute pomegranate juice, and that’s what
our
recipe calls for.

Most of the pine nuts sold in the grocery stores are imported from China and are very often bitter. The best pine nuts are harvested in the mountainous regions of Nevada and New Mexico. They aren’t in stores, but can be ordered direct over the
I
nternet. If you’re a stickler for authenticity, by all means order some. They make wonderful eating. However, they are harvested in the
Fall
and typically aren’t ready for shipment until Thanksgiving or later…although you can pre-order. They also sell out
pretty quickly, so don’t delay.

A cheaper alternative would be to substitute slivered almonds. This is a legal replacement since almonds were available in that part of the world in the 1
st
Century. In addition to eating the nuts out of hand and cooking and baking with them, they also pressed the nuts for their oil and made almond milk, which they used for cooking.

Ingredient list
along with comments:

1 C olive oil

1 C honey

1 C pomegranate juice

4 eggs

2 C barley flour

1 C wheat flour…if you want to be authentic use whole wheat flour

2 tsp salt

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp baking powder…This is an easy, but illegal ingredient. The only leavening available in the 1
st
Century was natural yeast. They would have mixed some of their starter into the barley flour.

1 C of pine nuts

1 ½ C raisins

1 ½ C chopped dates

3 C mixed dried fruit…Equal amounts of apples, plums (pr
unes), and apricots works well.

Citron
was the only citrus known in ancient Israel so it
is a legal ingredient. If desired, you may add some diced, candied citron. Adjust the quantities of t
he other fruits proportionally.

Optional
: Rose water, wine, grape or apple juice for basting

Directions
:
Heat oven to 275 degrees.
Grease two
8 1/2" x 4 1/2" loaf pan
s
and line them
with parchment or
wax
paper.
Sift all dry ingredients together and set aside. Dice the fruit small, mix in a bowl and set aside. Combine oil, eggs, pomegranate juice and honey. Alternately add portions of the dry ingredients and the oil mixture to the fruit, mixing well each time.

When batter is complete, p
our
it
into
the
prepared pan
s
and b
ake
for
2
½
to 3 hours.
Begin checking for doneness with a toothpick after 2 ¼ hours.
Let stand 15 minutes before removing from pans. Do not remove
the
paper.
When thoroughly cooled, carefully remove paper and w
rap
the loaf
in
cheesecloth soaked with any of the basting ingredients. Enclose in plastic wrap and then in
foil
and store
in
the back of the refrigerator for 2 weeks
.

Basted Fruitcake in Cheesecloth

For our demonstration we doubled the above recipe and baked the cakes in bread pans. It yielded four loaves.

The
F
inal
A
nalysis

As
you can see from the photo at the beginning of this chapter, we took our show on the
road and prepared
Laganum
Fructus
for the youngsters.
T
his was done as a teaching tool, a way for the these young people to experience a reasonable facsimile of what people may have eaten 2,000 years ago. Obviously, our goal was to make something that tasted good, but we felt accuracy should trump tasty.

To be brutally honest, the cakes were okay, but hardly great tasting. The cake is heavy on
dark
fruit…raisins, dates, and prunes and, for the sake of authenticity, we used whole wheat and barley flour. T
h
e combination of these two factors yielded a dark cake with a strong, but not particularly sweet flavor. Part of the problem, I believe, is that our modern
pallet is
accustomed to a much higher level of sweetness than the ancient one. What tasted sweet and good to them seemed coarse and dry to us. We served the cake with Cool Whip so the children co
uld supplement the taste a bit.

This in no way means the experiment/demonstration was a failure. Whether the cake was of blue ribbon quality or not, it was a success because we replicated something that they would never have otherwise experienced. I encourage you to pursue this rec
ipe with the same goal in mind.

Chapter Six

Caesar
Augustus’
Census

Arriving in Crowded Bethlehem

“
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was th
e first enrollment, when Quirin
ius was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city.
” —Luke 2:1 – 3

The older translations (KJV and Douay-Rheims) identify the Roman official in charge as
Cyrenius
,
while t
he newer translations call him
Quirinius
. The older versions simply use
d
the Greek form of his name, whereas the newer ones use the Latin. Either way, the opening of Luke’s birth narrative contains a passage that critics of the Gospel’s historicity have criticized. Some claim that there was no census, others that
Publius
Sulpicius
Q
uirinius
was never Governor of the Roman Provence of
Syria,
still others say it doesn’t align with historical records. Let’s start at the beginning and work our way through these, and other, objections.

Why Bother With a Census
in the First Place
?

The Constitution
of the Unite States requires a national census every ten years. The reason for this is that under the stipulated two-house Legislature, the number of Congressional Representatives for each state is proportional to its population. Anticipating the growth and expansion of the original thirteen colonies, the Founding Fathers realized that over time changes in population density would occur necessitating a re-adjustment of the seats in Congress. Following a census, the individual states redraw their congressional districts adding or subtracting as necessary and adjusting to population shifts within the states’ boundaries.

The Roman Empire, however, was a dictatorship. Though certain lower-level positions were subject to election, they had no need to re-district and re-adjust as we do today. The driving force behind the Roman census would have been economic rather than political. Like all governments, Rome depende
d
o
n tax revenue for its survival.

Early on, Rome developed a practice known as tax farming. Under this system, an individual or group of individuals formed a corporation and bid for the tax revenues of a particular region.  This accomplished several things. It transferred the work and worry of collecting the taxes to another party. It also guaranteed a given level of revenues. Thus, Roman
officials  knew
with certainty how much would come from a particular Provence and could budget accordingly. Meanwhile these tax corporations subdivided and resold regional taxing rights which were subdivided again and again down to the local administrator who actually collected the money. As it moved back upstream, each succeeding level skimmed a little off and passed the rest up t
he ladder not unlike the Mafia.

Regardless of how the taxes were applied or what was being taxed, then as now the money ultimately came from the pockets of individuals. And, the more individuals, the more revenue that could be collected. So those at the top of the pyramid wanted an accurate count of the population so they could estimate future income. Caesar Augustus was no slouch in this department. In his
Lives of the Caesars
, Roman Historian,
Seutonius
,
reports that Augustus, “…revived the office of the Censor which had long been disused and whose duty it had formerly been to take an account of the number of people.” During his 44- year reign, Augustus took three censuses…only slightly less frequently than the United States does.

Trying to Date Luke’s Census

To date the census Luke is speaking of, we first must examine the text.
The key phrase is, “
This was th
e first enrollment, when Quirin
ius was governor of Syria
.” Luke used the Greek word
protos
, meaning foremost (in time, place, order or importance) — before, beginning, best, chief, first (of all),
or
former. Unfortunately, the
early
translators of the New Testament didn’t concern themselves with the possibility of a historical conflict posed by their use of the word
first
. If they had, the passage might have read something like, “This was the census before the one taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.” This would have eliminated any confusion as to which census he was speaking of.