Fish House Punch is a classic eighteenth-century combination of lemons, sugar, and a “mixture” of rum, brandy, and peach brandy. Still commonly made in the twenty-first century, it is one of the oldest drinks in circulation. The punch began its long career as the house drink of the Colony in Schuylkill, a club of wealthy and prominent Philadelphians that, beginning in 1732, met regularly at their “fish house” on the Schuylkill river, just outside of town, to fish, eat, and drink. It was the club’s particular conceit that it was a sovereign colony of its own. After the American Revolution, it changed its name to the State in Schuylkill, keeping up the pretense that it was its own state—a pretense it maintains to this day.
Among the club’s peculiar traditions is its reliance entirely on the members and their guests to perform all of the labor associated with preparing its banquets, from shelling peas to mixing punch, each clad, in the club’s heyday, in “a straw hat, of ample dimensions, and [a] large white apron, the badges of membership.” (The aprons had big fish painted on them.) These guests have included at least two sitting United States presidents—George Washington and Chester Arthur—and numerous other dignitaries, including the Marquis de Lafayette, all of whom partook of the punch. See Washington, George. Although the club is a secretive one and has never officially published the formula for that punch, members of the club have repeatedly allowed it to escape into the wild, since at least 1850. It was first published by Jerry Thomas in 1862. See Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”.
It has often been claimed that the punch dates back to the club’s founding. This is unlikely, since mixed-spirit punches had not yet come into fashion in 1732, and at that time peach brandy had yet to acquire its reputation as a luxury spirit. Around 1900, two recipes for it were published that claimed to be transcripts of documents held in the club’s archive, one from 1793 and the other from 1795. These, which agree in all but detail (and may indeed be based on the same document), suggest a much more likely period for the famous formula’s origin, although there can be little doubt that the club served punch of some kind since its inception. The recipes also help to demonstrate a remarkable consistency in the drink’s composition over the years; indeed, later versions leaked by club members differ only in a more restrained use of sugar and a shrinking proportion of the increasingly difficult-to-find peach brandy in the mixture, from 25 percent to 4 percent.
Once its formula was in broad circulation, Fish House Punch became not just a Philadelphia specialty but a national one. In the process, it gained—in some hands, at least—various extraneous ingredients, from Madeira and champagne to curaçao and even cucumber. See curaçao. The disappearance of true peach brandy in the twentieth century led to further changes, including the use of the syrupy, peach-flavored liqueur sold as “peach brandy” and the substitution of whisky for the brandy (as an 1896 newspaper article observed about this switch, until the Civil War “whisky was looked upon as the drink of a groom and not of a gentleman”). In the twenty-first century, however, the cocktail revolution brought Fish House Punch back from the wilderness of whisky and white rum, while the micro-distillers supplied the true peach brandy.
Recipe: Dissolve 250 ml sugar in 250 ml lemon juice. Add 250 ml peach brandy, 250 ml cognac, and 500 ml Jamaican rum. Pour into bowl half-filled with ice and let sit for 30 minutes. Stir, grate nutmeg on top, and, if necessary, adjust proof with up to 1 liter cold water.
See also peach brandy.
Chambers, Julius. “Walks and Talks.” Brooklyn Eagle, January 16, 1905, 3.
“Fish-House Punch.” New York Sun, June 28, 1896, 2.
By: David Wondrich
Five veteran “citizens” of Philadelphia’s State in Schuylkill, pictured ca. 1890 with their characteristic white aprons and straw hats. Dr. William Camac (1829–1900), author of one of the more authoritative recipes for Fish House Punch, is at the left.
Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Five veteran “citizens” of Philadelphia’s State in Schuylkill, pictured ca. 1890 with their characteristic white aprons and straw hats. Dr. William Camac (1829–1900), author of one of the more authoritative recipes for Fish House Punch, is at the left. Source: Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.