Late summer to early fall was harvest season for my Sicilian grandfather's garden, where he grew, among other things, five-foot-long cucuzzi (also known as snake squash or bottle gourd) with seeds from Palermo. He'd bring it in for my grandmother, along with some of the leaves they called tenerumi, and she'd cook both in soups and stews.
You won't find cucuzza in a supermarket. Most cucuzza cooks grow it themselves. I recently spotted cucuzzi hanging from a fence near my home in the San Fernando Valley.
But every so often, this Sicilian specialty makes an appearance at farmers markets. That's where Northern California food storyteller Simona Carini encountered her first U.S.-grown cucuzza, a squash she'd only previously seen in Sicily.
Simona bought that cucuzza along with its leaves and created her own recipe, cucuzza e tenerumi al pomodoro. She shared with me the story behind the recipe and what she hopes readers will take away from her blog.
Tell me about your background.
I was born and grew up in Perugia, Central Italy, where I spent the first half of my life. I went to school there, my friends are there, and my family is there. At age 30ish, I moved to Northern California. My husband is American.
My last name is Sicilian. Carini is an ancient town not far from Palermo. However, my immediate family is not from Sicily. On both my mom's and my father's sides, our family is from Lazio, about 40 miles north of Rome, although my maternal grandmother was from Croatia, from Split.
When did you first encounter tenerumi and cucuzzi?
So it was 1980, which historically, for Italy, was a very hard summer. In June, a passenger plane was shot down over the island of Ustica. And shortly after that, there was a bomb in the city of Bologna. That was the year I flew for the first time.
We spent a couple of weeks there in this little town not far from Carini, which is called Villagrazia di Carini. And why there? It's because three of my classmates from elementary school were originally from Sicily. And I guess their uncle had a house there. We were basically 17 or 18; there were seven of us. And we hopped on a plane. It was my first flight, and we spent two weeks there. So that was the first time I had tenerumi.
We weren't really cooking, but we were in this small community, mostly of locals. We were not in a tourist place, so they kind of took pity on us because we were without anybody. And so I remember this neighbor bringing over pasta with tenerumi. I asked what it was, and I was told it was the leaves of young zucchini, but that was it.
Fast-forward. In 2007, I went back to Sicily with my husband, and we stayed in Palermo. We went to the market, and finally, I saw the cucuzza with the tenerumi. However, at the time, we were staying in hotels, so I couldn't really cook anything, but I took pictures.
So, for the first experience, we had the kitchen, but we weren't cooking, and for the second, I was cooking, but I didn't have a kitchen.
Then, in 2019, we were living in Berkeley, and I used to go to the farmers market on Saturday morning. I got there, and it was really funny because there was this group of people crowding around something. And this something was actually cucuzza and tenerumi.
They had never seen it. And one of the farm helpers was explaining.
The cucuzza had been harvested young, so it was shorter, but I bought it, and people were looking at me like, "How are you going to cook it?"
I was like, well, I know in Sicily they make pasta, they make soup. I developed my recipe mostly because I didn't want to make soup. I wasn't interested in trying to make pasta, so I wanted to cook it as vegetables. And so I basically put together what I had—the tenerumi and the cucuzza, tomato from the farmers market, and onion. So that's how I kind of developed the recipe.
What is the history of the cucuzza?
The thing about the cucuzza is that this plant actually came from Africa. It's been in Europe for a lot longer than zucchini. Then zucchini kind of took over.
Can you speak to the idea of consuming the whole plant?
This idea just speaks to me. It's a little bit like the tradition we have in Italy of using everything.
What do you hope that at-home cooks will take away from this recipe and your work?
Things don't have to be complicated, particularly Sicilian cooking. I mean, look at desserts, for example. Sicily has quintessentially decadent desserts if you think of cassata and all that kind of stuff. But the food itself is very simple. They cook fresh fish, they have vegetables, they have fruit, they make wonderful bread. And so I really try to make it so that people are less worried about the end result or if it fits some specific idea or if it is authentic.
The whole thing about authenticity is very difficult because if we look at the history of migration from Italy, people left because they were starving. I mean, not everyone, but there was an enormous amount of poverty. They came from Sicily or, in general, southern Italy; they arrived in New Jersey or New York.
I remember a friend of mine told me that she could always tell an Italian family because, in the winter, they would wrap up their fig tree. And I understand that everybody has fig trees in Italy; they don't need any care, and the fruit is good. But if you live in New Jersey or New York, you have to be careful about the winter. So what happened is that people had to adapt because they just didn't have the ingredients. So, already, to me, authenticity is not the right way to look at this. It is adaptability, which is how these people try to hold on to their traditions in a place that is completely foreign. And that's beautiful.
>>Get Simona's cucuzza e tenerumi al pomodoro recipe here!<<
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