Cohasset Punch , a mixture of rum, sweet vermouth, and lemon juice served with a piece of preserved peach in the glass, was a Chicago fixture from the 1890s until 1986, when the last saloon to serve it was demolished. The drink’s origins are unusually clear: it was invented in the 1890s when Louis Williams, who kept a saloon in the heart of that city’s theater district, was one of a group of bibulous sports the noted comic actor William H. Crane was entertaining at his summer house at Cohasset, on Massachusetts Bay. The party got to discussing punch and reached the conclusion that New England made the best ones. Williams was not satisfied with the verdict, and he wired his partner, Tom Newman, to ask him to come up with a counterargument in the form of a new punch and to ship a keg of it express. Newman’s Medford Rum–based concoction arrived and rapidly won over the crowd. See Medford Rum. Before long, it won over Chicago as well, both at the Williams & Newman saloon and through a bottled version, introduced by them in 1899 (by 1905 that version would be in national distribution, if modestly).
A recipe for the Cohasset Punch saw print in 1901, but habitués of Williams & Newman’s saloon agreed that neither it nor the bottled version did the drink true justice. For one thing, the “preserved peach” the recipe calls for was usually interpreted as half a canned peach, jammed into the bottom of a cocktail glass. At the bar, however, one got “an eighth section of a peach that had been soaked in brandy and some liqueur until it had become soft and thoroughly saturated” (brandied peaches, it should be noted, were an early American specialty then fading into the past). Where most bartenders would shake the drink, containing citrus as it did, Williams & Newman’s bartenders always stirred it, and at length. Finally, according to one frequenter of the bar, the “bartender always put in a dash of something from a brown bottle that did not appear in the list of ingredients.”
Recipe: Muddle ½ lemon cut in pieces in mixing glass. Add 60 ml amber rum, 60 ml sweet vermouth, 5 ml rich simple syrup, 1 dash orange bitters. Stir and strain into large champagne coupe with slice of brandied or canned peach.
Fougner, G. Selmer. “Along the Wine Trail.” New York Sun, November 11, 1938.
“The Origin of Cohasset Punch.” Bonfort’s Wine and Spirit Circular, August 10, 1902, 305.
Parnell, Sean, “Ladner Bros.: In Memoriam.” Chicago Bar Project. http://www.chibarproject.com/Memoriam/LadnerBros/LadnerBros.html (accessed February 26, 2021).
Sheridan, J. E. Complete Buffet Manual. Chicago: Henneberry, 1901.
By: David Wondrich