Pisco Punch is a much-storied drink, typically composed of pisco, lemon juice, fresh pineapple, and sugar or gum syrup, that is closely linked to San Francisco. The drink is often credited to Duncan Nicol, aka “Pisco John” (1852–1926), who operated the city’s Bank Exchange Saloon from 1893 until the onset of Prohibition, although it predates his tenure there: the Bank Exchange opened in 1853 and, as early advertisements show, always stocked pisco, which in San Francisco was almost always consumed in punch. Nonetheless, Nicol’s version of the drink became the iconic one. See Nicol, Duncan.
Pisco Punch at its most basic is not a San Francisco invention. Punch based on grape-based “aguardiente” was common on the west coast of South America, being recorded in Peru in 1791 and in Chile in 1822. By 1838, “pisco-punch,” based presumably on the Peruvian spirit, shipped from the port of Pisco, had gained a foothold in the American community in Honolulu (the Chileans would not begin calling their version “pisco” for another 50 years). See pisco. Pisco from Peru had been imported to the San Francisco Bay area by 1822, and with the Gold Rush the punch based on it became part of the city’s, and the region’s, drinking culture. But this was ordinary Pisco Punch: the same sort of punch—cold or hot—that was made with other spirits, but made with pisco. See punch. The drink served by Duncan Nicol was something different (it is unknown precisely when he began serving it: the first document definitively tying the drink to his bar is an advertisement from 1903, but by then the unique qualities of Pisco Punch had been a common topic in the city’s newspapers for over a decade).
The Bank Exchange’s Pisco Punch enjoyed legendary status for a libation. Those who tried the drink found it extraordinarily exhilarating and “propulsive.” Reporter Pauline Jacobson, who visited the bar in 1912, wrote: “One authority claims one punch ‘will make a gnat fight an elephant.’ Others maintain it floats them in the region of bliss of hasheesh [sic] and absinthe.” One of Nicol’s obituaries described the punch as an “ambrosial drink” that “softened all asperities, soothed every anguish of the hurt mind, stirred the imagination and seemed to make the whole world kin.”
Unfortunately, Nicol worked hard to keep his precise formula secret, stirring (never shaking) each drink from lemon juice squeezed to order, distilled water, and a mix he prepared each morning in the basement of the bar. That mix, and the additional secret ingredient or ingredients it is reputed to have contained, went with him to the grave.
That’s not the end of the story, though: in the absence of an “official” recipe, many people have stepped in to offer their versions of the drink. Some of those people had close ties to Nicol. In June 1959, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Millie Robbins received a recipe from an “E. J. P. of San Carlos,” who claimed to have been a close friend of Nicol, who prepared the punch in his “then new home on Franklin Street in January 1921.” E. J. P. (probably Emile J. Pierron, who is listed in the city directory as living on Franklin Street then) also wrote that he was at Nicol’s bedside “when he passed away in that Sutter Street hospital in February 1926”; that information, too, checks out, lending credibility to his recipe, which involves marinating pineapple triangles in sugar and pisco and adding them and some of their marinating liquid to a punch stirred up from gum syrup, lime juice, pisco, and water.
This recipe is quite close to the one discovered in 1973 by reporter William Bronson, in a 1941 letter by John Lannes, who had worked for Nicol and managed the Bank Exchange the last year before Prohibition. And in fact both recipes are remarkably similar to the one for “Pisco Punch—Peruvian” printed in 1915, around the height of the drink’s popularity, in a cookbook published for the San Francisco Panama Pacific Exposition—and to the one drinks columnist G. Selmer Fougner printed in the New York Sun in 1939, found in a Bank Exchange promotional booklet Nicol had given one of Fougner’s readers in 1916. See Fougner, G. Selmer. If Nicol’s exact recipe was lost, then, at least its broad outlines are known.
None of these recipes, however, provides the curious effects described by Pauline Jacobson in 1912, which suggests Nicol’s punch may have contained something else. There is an 1864 San Francisco newspaper article that describes the experiences of a man drinking an unidentified “High Toned Drink” in the Bank Exchange Saloon. It describes “exhilarating” symptoms, similar to the ones described by Jacobson, that are compatible with the use of cocaine. Tonics and syrups containing cocaine were very popular from the 1860s to the 1890s; Vin Mariani used coca leaves from Peru in its tonic wine, and Coca-Cola also used them in early production. These concoctions were declared illegal in 1914, and their use in the Pisco Punch may have given Nicol reason to keep the recipe secret until his death.
Recipe (Lannes’s): Make a rich simple syrup of 500 g sugar and 250 ml water. Peel and core a pineapple, cut it into rings, cut each ring into 6-8 wedges, and marinate overnight in the syrup. Strain out the chunks and refrigerate. Combine 750 ml Peruvian pisco (Italia style) and 250 ml of the syrup and bottle. To mix, stir with cracked ice 60 ml of the mix, 20 ml lemon or lime juice, and 45 ml water. Strain into large, chilled coupe and add a pineapple chunk.See also Nicol, Duncan; pisco; and punch.
Bronson, William. “Secrets of Pisco Punch revealed.” California Historical Quarterly, Fall, 1973, pp. 229–40.
Fougner, G. Selmer. “Along the Wine Trail.” New York Sun, October 6 and 7, 1939, pp. 36 and 25.
Lafond, Gabriel. Voyages autour du monde et naufrages celebres, vol 3. Paris: 1844, p. 211.
Toro-Lira, Guillermo. History of Pisco in San Francisco: A Scrapbook of First Hand Accounts. Lima, Peru: Createspace, 2010.
Toro-Lira, Guillermo. Wings of Cherubs: Saga of the Rediscovery of Pisco Punch. North Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2007.
By: Guillermo L. Toro-Lira and David Wondrich