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Cohasset Punch
Use mixing glass, take 1 ounce of Cohasset, ½ ounce of simple syrup, 4 dashes lemon juice, shaved ice and plain water. Mix with spoon and pour into 12-ounce tall glass, decorate with fruit and sprig mint, serve with straws.
A fountain-style build from the era when soda dispensers kept bottled proprietary punches on the back bar alongside their syrups. The whole recipe hinges on a product you can no longer buy off the shelf.
- What "Cohasset" means hereNot an ingredient you measure out yourself but a bottled proprietary punch, used the way a modern bar uses a liqueur. Cohasset Punch was rum-based and flavored with peach. The book assumes you have the bottle and says nothing about which.
- Substituting for itThe closest approximation is dark rum with peach syrup or peach-in-syrup liquid, in roughly equal parts, to make up the 1 ounce. For a fountain-style version with no spirit, use peach syrup alone and expect a much sweeter drink, so cut the simple syrup back.
- Dashes of lemonDash bottles were never standardised, so four dashes is somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon in total rather than a full teaspoon. It is there to keep the sweetness in line, so taste and add more if your punch substitute is sugary.
- Mixing glassA pint metal or glass mixing vessel of the sort used at soda fountains. Any pint glass or the bottom of a shaker works; the drink is stirred rather than shaken, which is why the instruction says "mix with spoon."
- Shaved iceShaved, not cubed: it chills fast and dilutes as it melts. The recipe gives no quantity for the plain water; top up to about an inch from the rim of the tall glass.
- The tall glassA 12-ounce glass filled with ice takes only 6 to 8 ounces of liquid, so 1½ ounces of syrup and punch is right for a long, mild drink. Do not scale up the base to fill the glass or it becomes cloying.
- Yield and garnishOne drink. "Decorate with fruit" leaves the choice open; orange, cherry and pineapple are the usual candidates. Slap the mint once between the palms before it goes in.
Cohasset Punch was a Chicago product, and its origin story is repeated everywhere in the trade press of the period without much documentation behind it: the punch is generally traced to the bar at Chapin & Gore in Chicago, said to have been mixed for the actor Frank Chanfrau, who summered at Cohasset on the Massachusetts shore, and named for the town. Chapin & Gore bottled it commercially, which is how it comes to appear in a soda book at all -- by the early twentieth century a fountain man could pour it from a labeled bottle without knowing or caring what was in it, the same way he poured grenadine or orgeat. Recipes like this one are a reminder that the American soda fountain and the American bar shared a vocabulary, a set of tools, and often a counter, and that the line between a punch and a soda depended less on the ingredients than on who was standing behind it.