The Mystery of the "Googootz"

About a week ago, my Dad came home asking me if I had ever eaten a googootz. I replied that I didn't even understand what he was saying to me, and thus began the mystery of the googotz, aka una cucuzza, aka a squash that looks more like an over-sized string bean than anything that exists in real life.

The word googootz is the Italian-American version of the word cucuzza, which is the Sicilian word for said vegetable. I didn't understand this word for three reasons. Firstly, it's gotten muddled up and turned around by generations of Italian-Americans (the same culture that brought you the gabbagool, also known as cappacola). Italian-Americans speak their own dialect of Italian, and I'm just not familiar with it. Secondly, a lot of the Italian-American dialect has sprung from the Sicilian dialect, since most of the Italians immigrating to North America were Sicilian. So we have layers upon layers of dialects, neither of which I speak. And thirdly - I honestly have never seen this vegetable before in my entire life.



Of course we got right to work trying to figure out what the heck a googootz really is. First, we had to nail down the spelling (gagootz? gaggotz?), and then it took a while to figure out the actual Italian word. Apparently googootz is also used to mean dummy, in an endearing way (see here). And after finding this gem of a website, we learned that the Italian cucuzza has quite the following (and even a song!).

So now I have a new summer goal to preoccupy me in my unemployment: find the elusive cucuzza, photograph it, and cook it!