From the Mailbag: Zweigle's and Grandma Brown's Baked Beans

From the Mailbag: Zweigle's and Grandma Brown's Baked Beans

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published August 23, 2016 and can be found here.

Zweigle's and Grandma Brown's Baked Beans. A real Rochester banquet.


     By       Mike Governale

Every once in a while we like to share fun stuff from the Rochester Subway mailbag. Here's an email from a Rochester expatriate now living in New England. John Zicari is keeping tabs on his old home town by following sites like ours, while longing for some of the finer things in life. John writes...

Just wanted to send you a message of thanks for the great things you do. I moved to New England 22 years ago from Rochester and know what a great place the Rochester area is. Most of my family still resides there but I do not make it back to visit very often. Your website offers so many unique, intelligent and interesting points of views on all things Rochester that I await impatiently each new posting.

I love the old pictures that accompany the articles and always find what you write about interesting. So many people, when they live in an area, find nothing but bad things to say about the place. I realize things are not perfect, but there is such vibrancy and fresh thinking going on there - only positive results can occur.

Living near Portsmouth NH I am constantly reminded of the history all around. But I am also reminded of the homogeneous demographics around here leaving a rather bland (read white) mentality. A good Italian bakery, a Ukrainian festival or something other than fried seafood is hard to find around here!

My sister recently sent us some     Zweigle's

external link

hots and i found a recipe for     Grandma Brown's

external link

beans to round out our feast. A real Rochester banquet.

So keep up the excellent work that you do and know that there are people out there loving every word and image you put out! I am a descendant of Irish canal workers who appear in the Rochester City Directories in the 1840's and Italian immigrants who arrived in 1914, all who contributed to what Rochester would become. So I proudly wear the mantle of someone from there! (warts and all)

Thanks again.

John Zicari
   York, Maine

On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur

* * *

Chris Gemignani

Chris Gemignani

Rochester, NY, USA