Eric Felton of the Wall Street Journal weighed in with this nice piece about Chicago bartenders creating new concoctions reflecting the situation with our (still sitting) Governor. LH
The delightfully vulgar Blagojevich affair has inspired some Chicago bartenders to commemorate the moment. At Harry Caray’s Italian Steakhouse this week, they offered a drink made of peach liqueur, Effen Vodka, and lemonade on the rocks, ingredients that inspire the name of the special mix: the Impeach Effen Blago Cocktail. It was priced at $6. For $100 the bar would add some color-of-money Midori to the glass, calling it the Senate Seat. (There were no takers for that one, though Patrick Fitzgerald is said to have recorded all the conversations regarding the drink.)
Adam Seger of the Chicago restaurant Nacional 27 has also been working up a Blago-billed cocktail, the ImPeach-tini. As with the Harry Caray steakhouse quaff, Nacional 27’s drink riffs on a peachy ingredient to underpin its title. In honor of the governor’s Serbian heritage, The ImPeach-tini uses a Balkans firewater made from the fuzzy fruit.
![[Cohasset Punch]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AK506_DRCOHA_D_20081217181839.jpg)
Dylan Cross for The Wall Street Journal
Cohasset Punch
1½ oz dark rum
1 oz sweet vermouth
juice of ½ lemon
½ oz syrup from canned peaches
½ oz Grand Marnier
2 dashes orange bitters
Start by putting half a canned peach in the bottom of a saucer champagne glass; then half-fill the glass with shaved ice. Put all the liquid ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into the glass.
But if (im)peaches are going to be at the heart of any Blagtail, it may be hard to beat the Cohasset Punch, a drink that for decades was the essential Chicago cocktail, and whose most notable feature was its garnish: half a canned peach.
The drink turned up at the turn of the last century. But come World War II, it was still a standard feature of Chicago drinking. So much so that when Saul Bellow describes an all-too-predictable cocktail party at the house of Chicago intellectuals in his debut novel, 1944’s “Dangling Man,” he writes of the details he could have known “hours, days, weeks before.” There was “the light furniture in the popular Swedish style, the brown carpet, the Chagall and Gris prints, the vines trailing from the mantelpiece, the bowl of Cohasset punch.”
How is it that a drink named after the town of Cohasset, Mass., came to be the definitive Chicago cocktail? Victorian-era actor William H. Crane was the Lon Chaney of his day — a master of transforming his features with greasepaint and putty. He was also one of the most successful actors of the time, making it possible for him to throw fashionable parties at his summer house in Cohasset. Having played long runs in Chicago’s Hooley Theatre and the opera house, Crane had plenty of opportunity to acquaint himself with the town’s better bartenders, one of whom he brought out to Cohasset to do the mixing at one of his parties. Gus Williams came up with an original drink of dark rum, sweet vermouth, lemon juice, orange bitters and the syrup from a can of peaches, that was the hit of the fête. And so, once back in Chicago, Williams put the punch he had created in Cohasset on the menu at his place, Williams & Newman, where it began its reign as the town’s most distinctive drink.
When Williams got ready to hang up his jigger and shaker, about 1916, he sold the recipe for Cohasset Punch to the Ladner Bros. saloon, where the cocktail would return after Prohibition. Ladner Bros. dispensed so much of the stuff — both across the mahogany and in bottles for retail sale — that it put a huge neon sign out front proclaiming the bar to be the “Home of Cohasset Punch.” Ladner Bros. was also famous for its twittering row of caged parakeets, which occasioned no end of jokes about being so high on the drink that one could hear “the birdies sing.”
The Ladner brothers attempted to keep the recipe a super-secret secret — complete with the classic promotional shtick of announcing that the only copy of the recipe was a scrap of paper yellowing in a bank vault. But the knowledge seeped out and spread around the Chicago area. By 1950 the swanky Edgewater Beach Hotel on the shore of Lake Michigan was serving an Edgewater Beach Cocktail that was in every respect — right down to the shaved ice and peach garnish — a copy of the Cohasset Punch.
Cohasset Punch built a reputation for being “seductive.” Which is to say that the hard liquor at its core was so effectively masked by the sweet and fragrant ingredients that one might easily overindulge. “Harmless looking, pleasant tasting,” wrote one correspondent to the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1936 of the punch. After three or four of them, “a pleasant mellowness steals over you, your imagination glows, you discover humor you never possessed.” When you finally get up to go, “lo, your legs are merely attached to your body for appearance’s sake.”
A less kind word for a “seductive” drink is that it is “bland.” And whipping up a few batches of Cohasset Punch I found that, though not bad, it was missing a little something. I tried a bit of this and a bit of that, and finally stumbled on the benefits of spiking the original recipe with half an ounce of Grand Marnier (an orange liqueur that harmonized with the orange bitters and also, thanks to its brandy base, gave the drink the extra depth it needed).
I might note that Bellow’s fictional party serving Cohasset Punch doesn’t go very well, in no small part due to overindulgence in the seductive drink. The drunken hostess submits to a guest’s malicious efforts at hypnotism, and she goes into a full freak-out. The ugliness of the affair leads the protagonist to muse on the fallen nature of man — or as Bellow puts it, “that most natural of human conditions, corruptness.” One has to be “faithful to the facts, and corruptness was one of them.”
No one will accuse the governor of Illinois of being unfaithful to that enduring fact, which makes Cohasset Punch the perfect drink with which to toast the downfall of Chicago’s currently dangling man.
