Cogoots
In a business meeting the other day I was telling my colleagues about my zucchini experience. (Doesn’t everybody have one?) As we all laughed through my story, and they added recollections of their family foods, one said “you should write this up, it’s a woman telling her story!”
That’s what we do at Burke and Okrent, LLC. We are women: telling our stories. We usually tell them in a formal, rigorous, almost academic way. For nearly 20 years we have been collecting women’s stories through surveys and telling them through webinars and workshops. But here was another kind of story, the personal, sharable story that captures memories, and lets them become even more robust as other people chime in. Especially people who share similar experiences. So when I wrote on Facebook about how my grandmother cooked zucchini, my childhood friends immediately and spontaneously began revealing their memories. Not only of the food but of the people who grew it, cooked it, ate it.
We were all children again, wearing pigtails, white ankle socks, and sneakers, sitting at big tables with grandparents, aunts, and cousins all together. The squash in my garden became like Proust’s madeleines, taking me back through time to my grandmother’s kitchen; to the tastes, and to the memories of friends who brought her fresh vegetables from their gardens, and their recipes to share. In my mind I could see the food, even smell and taste it.
I knew I could figure out how to recreate the recipes, but wanted to learn about other people’s attempts. No New York Times recipe collection or fancy cookbooks, even the authentic Italian ones, hit just the right flavors. So I searched for websites written by Italian-American home cooks, grandchildren of immigrants recalling what their Nonni had made when they were children. And there, more like biscotti than a madeleine, I found the missing key to my memory – a word! These omnipresent green veggies were not “zucchini” according to Jack, the blogger, but “cocozelle,” the name on his grandfather’s seed package. He mused about how every family seemed to have its own name for the vegetable, “someone’s interpretation of an Italian word spoken by a relative in the family who came from ‘the old country.’” Suddenly, the Italian-American/Upstate New York name, “cogoots,” came to me unbidden, flooding my mind, my memories, my taste buds, my smiles.
So I posted a few lines and a link on my Facebook page. Literally within minutes, my high school buddies, many of whom were also second-generation Italian-Americans, joined in. “I haven’t heard the word ‘cogoots,’ in ever so long!” wrote Pat, whom I met in first grade. I could see her mother and her brothers, now long gone, and sense the warmth of her memory. I had made up the spelling, but nobody offered a better alternative. We all recognized it. “I can hear my Aunt Enes saying ‘cogoots,’” added Michael, the kid who grew up next door, and always seemed to have a broken arm in a cast. I could hear his Aunt Enes, too, because of course, I remember her, and her cooking.
The full meaning of cogoots goes far beyond food, (w-a-a-y beyond “zucchini.”) Ace recalled, “my mother used to call me a ‘cogoots.’” I pictured his mischievous smile and thought, of course, she did. A ‘cogoots’ is a kind of clown, a kook, someone who had just done something silly, lacking in judgment. Something relatively harmless, but just not a good idea. “Pay attention, you are pouring water all over the floor, you ‘cogoots!’” Or “Did you see that? He let the ball go right through his legs! What a ‘cogoots!’” The term can be widely applied, mostly to men and boys.
It’s autumn in Massachusetts, so we have many squash harvested. Sure, I’ll grill some or make very refined omelets, as my college friends suggested, and maybe bake zucchini bread, which seemed so “American” when my aunts brought home new recipes from their friends at work. But I’ll also continue to expand my cogoots repertoire -- with eggs, with onions and peppers, and with tomatoes, or with sauce (two different things). And breaded not with light, crispy panko crumbs, but as Ace’s mother and my grandmother required, with heavy, dense Italian flavored breadcrumbs.
So we have zucchini, which I've known better than to grow before, but since the pandemic, even I am gardening. I tried breading some with panko crumbs but realized that they needed old fashioned Italian bread crumbs, which I didn’t have in the house. Then, looking around the internet, I found a website with familiar recipes, including one for “cocozelle,” and suddenly I found myself back in my grandmother's kitchen at this time of year, eating “cogoots” and scrambled eggs. Hope you enjoy some food memories, perhaps with the help of this website. Naturally, I didn't make the dish the way he describes.
Zucchini (Cogoots) from my garden—complete with blossom