Fish House Punch

Refreshing Fish House Punch cocktail with lime garnish and ice in decorative glass on blue background

According to cocktail historian David Wondrich in his book “Imbibe!”, Fish House Punch should be “made a mandatory part of every Fourth of July.” If the punch’s provenance is indeed as historic as people claim it is, then it may well deserve priority over cans of beer that say “America” on them. And with a tart dose of citrus plus the requisite gigantic cube of ice, it’s certainly a refreshing Summer concoction.

Fish House Punch is said to have originated with the “State in Schuylkill”, a Philadelphia rod and gun club founded in 1732. Legends have it that it was served in a bowl large enough to baptize a baby in.

I was skeptical of this origin story at first, with the prohibitive cost of citrus. But this was an illustrious club that through the years hosted no less than George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette and Chester Arthur. According to Wondrich’s other book “Punch,” punch containing citrus and rum was a pricy status drink by the late seventeenth century. Fish House Punch began to make even more sense when I thought of the drink as a way to preserve the lemon juice itself – some recipes call for aging the punch a year or more.

Citrus got a boost in affordability and availability in the 1800s, first with the U.S. acquisition of formerly Spanish territories, and then with the building of railways to distribute fruit to cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Recipes for Fish House Punch began to appear in regional papers in the 1860s.
In 1898, the Baltimore Sun praised the selection of beverage recipes found in Mrs. Charles Marshall’s Confederate relief benefit cookbook “Recipes Old and New.” The Sun informed readers that in the book they would find recipes for eggnog, cherry bounce, Confederate punch, Roman Punch, and the “difficult to obtain” formula for Philadelphia Fish House Punch.

Vintage Fish House Punch recipe by John Weaver, America's best mixologist for 30 years, featuring brandy, rum, and peach brandy ingredients

Single serving Fish House Punch, Afro-American,1939

That Philadelphia Fish House Punch recipe, contributed by Philadelphian Mrs. George Dallas Dixon, contains some unusual inclusions including green tea and red Curaçao. It is nearly the oldest Fish House Punch recipe published in a Maryland cookbook – but not quite. The 1897 “Up-To-Date Cookbook of Tested Recipes” from Montgomery County contains a more traditional recipe contributed by Mrs. J. Maury Dove. Her husband was a coal company president who had done business in Philadelphia so they too may have acquired the recipe directly.

The recipe I ultimately used, from “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland,” comes from Mrs. Charles H. Tilghman of Gross Coate. (More on Gross Coate in the stewed mushrooms recipe.)

This recipe is nearly identical to the one printed in “Imbibe!”, which originated from a Philadelphia lawyer and “must be considered authentic,” according to Wondrich. It is considered customary to serve this punch with one large ice block. I didn’t have the foresight to freeze a big hunk of ice, but I wasn’t even serving the punch out of a bowl, so I used store-bought ice.

The punch came out very sweet – I would recommend cutting the sugar by half or more – and the lack of real peach brandy prevents us from truly channeling the 18th-century “club man” vibe. Luckily the phony peach flavor of modern peach brandy kind of works here.

This Independence Day I may just have a glass or two of Fish House Punch before moving on to those beers.