Chicken French, other Rochester dishes feed memories and bring us comfort
My granddaughter Alyssa Memmott and her boyfriend, Peter Regala, were in town from Chicago for Christmas.
They work in the restaurant industry and know their way around a kitchen. Thus, they prepared a pre-Christmas Eve, Chicken French dinner for about 12 of us. Was it terrific? Of course it was.
I should know. A few years ago, I made the case for Chicken French as Rochester’s signature dish. I was sort of right.
Chicken French was devised locally, evolving from Veal French. It’s on restaurant menus everywhere here. I know that the Garbage Plate is supreme in Monroe County, but Chicken French is a contender, it really is.
I know now that when I think of Chicken French, I’ll always think of Alyssa, home for Christmas, in the kitchen, taking charge, fussing. I’ll turn my head and look and there she will be passing a pan to Peter, laughing and happy. So am I.
Alyssa also baked some chocolate chip cookies, made with brown butter. They were to die for. In the future, I’ll always compare chocolate chip cookies to Alyssa’s. Hers will be the gold standard.
That, of course, is what all this food stuff is about. it’s not just Chicken French, or chocolate chip cookies, it’s all the memories they trigger; that’s the comfort in comfort food.
Another case in point: Grandma Brown’s Beans the iconic light-brown ready-to-be doctored bit of heaven that came out of Mexico, NY, for years, until
it didn’t.
In an April column, I bemoaned the fact that the beans had been off the shelves since 2021, a victim of the pandemic and labor shortages and who knows what else. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) any word on when the beans
might return.
The response to the column was moving, as readers shared their accounts of how important Grandma Brown’s was to them and their families.
Essentially, Grandma Brown’s was the queen of comfort food, tasty, inoffensive, worthy of a place of honor on any table.
I could have written about Grandma Brown’s every week, adding updates, recipes. The column would be all beans, 24/7.
You know what would happen. Mike Kilian, the editor of the Democrat & Chronicle, would take me aside. “Let’s talk,” he would say. You know the rest. Grandma Brown’s would be off the table.
Not to worry. So many comfort foods, so little time. I could write, as I have only once or twice, about Zweigle’s hot dogs. People here are fierce about Zweigle’s.
And, obviously, mere mention of a Garbage Plate takes Rochester residents down memory lane. Abbott’s Frozen Custard has the same effect.
In my birth family, Yorkshire pudding triggers a ton of memories. It’s basically a popover that fills a whole pan. Yellow and eggy, it should rise in the oven and then be eaten drowned in gravy.
My father’s Yorkshire pudding was wonderful, the equivalent of Alyssa and Peter’s Chicken French. In 2023, my brother Mark’s Yorkshire pudding was wonderful. Mine was awful. I tried several times, oh how I tried, but it didn’t rise. Cardboard had more taste. When it comes to pudding, I’m not my father.
But I have the memory of his Yorkshire pudding, just as I have the memory of my mother’s meat-potato-pie and Alyssa’s and Peter’s Chicken French.
In many ways, it would seem, we are what we ate, as children, as adults, even as grandparents, letting the grandchildren take over so new memories can emerge.
From his home in Geneseo, Livingston County, retired senior editor Jim Memmott, writes Remarkable Rochester, who we were, who we are. He can be reached at jmemmott@gannett.com or write Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454