And you might ask, what of the grand old Schuylkill Fishing Company? Research will tell you little of it since the 1930s, but it lives on in the same building (“the Castle”) it has occupied since 1812-moved lock, stock and bowl to its current plot in 1937-and was lovingly restored in 2000. Your Doctor is shouldering the mantle of remembrance and thinks you should do the same. Perhaps it seems long ago, when tradition and convivial dignity still attached themselves to the invocation of this bowl. My contrary favorite, though, is the following dandification from 1893, the year of the first World’s Fair, from a little book titled Beverages & Sandwiches For Your Husband’s Friends by One Who Knows. I make mine with just the liquor!” I loved it, but the rest of the guests were looking a bit green around the gills. Haigh, I always felt they muddled the recipe up with too many ingredients. Why? In her words (in a classic Katharine Hepburn accent), “Mr. Smith was famed for having an eternal bowl of Fish House Punch in her refrigerator. Walton Hall Smith, whose long-departed husband, in 1939, penned the book Liquor, the Servant of Man. Goodfellow’s Cooking School in 1907 that added oranges, strawberries or pineapple but called the addition of green tea “an abomination.” I was once a guest in the Kansas City home of Mrs. Jerry Thomas related a simple (and probably accurate) recipe using lemon juice, sugar, water, peach brandy, Cognac and rum in 1862. Located between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers in what is now Pennsylvania, the “Colony in Schuylkill” became the “State in Schuylkill” in 1782, upon the event of American Independence.Ī recipe as old as Fish House Punch, fervently slurped by the Father of Our Country, has inevitably gone through many fanciful formulations. Everyone fished, ate, toasted and drank, happily shielded from domestic care. At its core it was a club: The Schuylkill Fishing Company. In 1732, fully 104 years before Texas declared itself a Republic, Schuylkill (pronounced “SKOO-kull”), home of Fish House Punch, was its own colony, and later its own sovereign state. In the annals of-and before-our nation’s foundation, never has a specific beverage held such a symbolic position amid the wraiths of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette and other elder statesmen come and gone. This is when I want punch, real punch, that of ancestors and history. So while the band plays “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, with me its lyrics waft most vividly here in this stretch of warm, long-fading sunset. Summer is leaving us and the leaves are turning.
I get a certain feeling in autumn: a cocktail mix of memory, wistfulness, retrospect and melancholy.
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