Cuccìa

Cuccìa is a Sicilian dish of boiled wheat berries sweetened with sugar, eaten on 13 December, the feast day of Saint Lucy, the patron saint of Syracuse. It is made in Sicily, in isolated pockets of southern Italy and in Sicilian communities abroad. Tradition ties the dish to the relief of a food shortage, when a cargo of wheat is said to have reached the port of Palermo on Saint Lucy's feast in 1646, and custom holds that no bread is eaten that day, so cuccìa is the only source of wheat and the main nourishment of the day. Families and regions prepare it differently: some serve it as a soup, others as a pudding, and Sicilian Americans in Kansas City, Missouri, often make it as a hot cereal. Most traditional versions add sugar, butter, chocolate and milk, while chickpeas, broad beans, almonds and ricotta appear more rarely. The word is unrelated to similar Italian words, which hints at a foreign origin, and the dish may descend from Sicily's Byzantine period, since a similar dish called koliva is prepared in the Balkans and kutia is served in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.