Coleva
(All Soul's Broth. Greece.) Boil 1 quart of milk, add 1/2 pint of cooked barley, 1/2 cup each of washed raisins and currants, 1 cup of chopped raw apples and nutmeg, sugar and cinnamon to taste. Cook for 1/2 hour and serve hot.
The peasants are very fond of this, which they make and put in dishes on the graves of the dead, All Souls' Eve, for the yearly feast of the departed.
A milk-and-barley porridge in soup clothing. It behaves like a loose rice pudding, so the main risks are scorched milk and barley that swells the whole thing solid.
- The hinge: keep it off a hard boilOnce the barley and dried fruit go in, the mixture thickens and catches on the bottom within minutes over direct heat. Hold it at a bare simmer on the lowest burner and stir often, or set the pan over a water bath as a Victorian cook with a double boiler would have.
- Half a pintIn American measure that is one cup, and the book is American, so 8 fl oz is the reading to work from. Under imperial measure a half-pint would be 10 fl oz, which would give a noticeably thicker result.
- Cooked barleyPearl barley, boiled until tender and drained — about 1/3 cup dry yields the cup called for. Pot barley or hulled barley takes considerably longer to soften and will still be chewy after the half hour in milk.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh red or black currants. They are sold with the raisins, not the berries.
- Washed raisinsPeriod dried fruit arrived with grit, stems and dust, hence the instruction; sulphuring was also in use. Modern packaged fruit needs only a rinse, though a brief soak in warm water keeps it from drawing liquid out of the milk.
- ApplesA firm tart variety holds its shape over thirty minutes; a soft eating apple dissolves into the milk. Cut the pieces no larger than the raisins so everything finishes together.
- Spicing and sweetnessStart with about 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and a few grates of nutmeg for the quart of milk, then adjust at the end — the dried fruit contributes more sweetness than it seems to at the start.
- YieldRoughly six small bowls. It sets firm on cooling and can be loosened with a little more warm milk.
Coleva is the compiler's spelling of kollyva (κόλλυβα), the boiled-grain dish of Orthodox memorial rites, eaten at funerals, at the forty-day and annual commemorations, and above all on the Saturdays of Souls that precede Lent and Pentecost. The traditional version is not a soup at all: whole wheat berries, boiled and drained, mixed with walnuts, raisins, pomegranate seeds, parsley and often sesame, mounded on a platter and blanketed in powdered sugar. The grain carries an explicit scriptural reading — the seed that must fall into the ground and die before it bears fruit — and the dish is blessed by a priest before it is shared out. What appears here is that rite passed through an American cookbook of 1902, in which the wheat has become barley, the whole thing has been slackened with a quart of milk and filed under Soups. Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea collected dishes from many countries at second hand, and the result is less a record of what Greek villagers ate than of what an English-speaking household could be persuaded to cook from a description of it. The closing note about dishes left on graves is broadly accurate to the custom, though kollyva is more commonly brought to church and distributed to the living in memory of the dead.