One of the best of the ambrosial legends wafted down the San Francisco decades since that dreamy period of unearthly wonderment known as “before the fire,” part myth, part recorded fact, part recollected grandeur consecrated by long acceptance, concerns the Pisco punch.
Around this sacramental brew the regional mythology of San Francisco's Golden Age of Nabobs and Splendid Living gathers, perfumed by names that will live as long as she Old West recalls its heroes and its magnificos: Duncan Nicol, Leland Stanford, Joaquin Miller, and John Mackay. Others are shadowy or substantial as the light of time glances over their remembered profiles, the Emperor Norton, François Pioche, David Scannell, Isaac Requa, John Percival Jones, Mark Twain, and the god-like William Morris Stewart.
As with the Palace Hotel, there was scarcely a personality of consequence or character in nineteenth-century San Francisco who cannot be associated, as one of the faithful at Duncan Nicol's Hank Exchange Bar, with the miracle and benison that all men of good will and sound judgment universally admitted the Pisco punch to be. No regional drink, not even the benevolent julep of Kentucky, the Medford rum of Yankee New England, or the Taos Lightning which brought civilization to the region the Denver Post likes to call the Rocky Mountain Empire, was more truly indigenous to the place of its most appreciative consumption. To be sure, the basic spirit from which Pisco was compounded was imported in great earthenware pipkins by sailing ship from far-off Peru, where the volcanic soil gave to the grapes an essential genius encountered nowhere else on earth. Until it reached San Francisco, however, Pisco remained merely one more of the ardent spirits that inspired men have evolved over the centuries from the grapes and grains of earth.
Once in the hands of Duncan Nicol it was translated, as by consecration in the name of a divinity more benevolent than all others, into Pisco punch, the wonder and glory of San Francisco's heady youth, the balm and solace of fevered generations, a drink so endearing and inspired that although its prototype has vanished, its legend lingers on, one with the Grail, the unicorn, and the music of the spheres.
Like much of the vocabulary of California and many of the customs, artifacts, and social institutions of early San Francisco, Pisco was an inheritance from the Spanish days of the great ranches. Along with the Golden Gate and the Presidio at Monterey, the inheritors of California took over a number of pleasant aspects of Old Spain: the talma, or short cloak, of the mounted grandee, the siesta and the love of case it represented, a habit of calling the highways caminos, and a pronounced taste for Pisco.
Pisco punch, so far as anyone can discover, originated in the premises called Parker's Hank Exchange, which opened in 1853 in the Montgomery Block, an edifice built by General Halleck and representing to its generation in San Francisco all that the Empire State Building was to represent to New York three-quarters of a century later. The Montgomery Block, at the junction of Washington, Montgomery, and Columbus Avenues, speedily became the most admired professional address in San Francisco and was filled with the offices of lawyers, top-ranking merchants, and the private bankers of the time. On its second floor was a splendid red-and-gold billiard parlor; directly beneath, and under the same management, was Parker's Bank Exchange Saloon.
Somewhere in the shifting mists that obscure San Francisco each evening as the sun goes down beyond the Golden Gate, the original Parker disappeared from behind the bar of this favored oasis. In his place there emerged—and name his name with bugles-Duncan Nicol, an authoritative, almost clerical figure, clad in immaculate white, his eyeglasses hanging over his right ear.
In the fifties in San Francisco a saloon for gentlemen that was run by men of breeding and manners was an extreme rarity. Barry and Patten, themselves New ling-landers from fine families, set the style when they opened their saloon in Montgomery Street next to the first office of Wells Fargo and Company. Their walls were hung with choice paintings, nudes not among them. Gambling was forbidden and the wines and liquor were irreproachable. There were no libraries or reading rooms, and many patrons COOK to the town's better saloons to read their mail and the local newspapers. The New York and Boston papers, usually about three months old, which had come around the Horn in sailing ships, were on racks for all to peruse. Barry and Patten are still known to a later generation of San Franciscans for their gentle and illuminating book of recollections of the town in pioneer times.
It was the success of Barry and Patten in attracting a clientele of respected merchants, professional men, and first citizens generally that inspired Parker and his successor, Nicol, to undertake I similar project in the Bank Exchange.
Nicol was like no bartender or saloonkeeper before or since. In a generation when most San Francisco bartenders were recruited from the slugging carnivals of the Barbary Coast and acted as their own bouncers, he fairly radiated respectability. Merely to be admitted to the Bank Exchange was a patent of social and financial probity. Nicol tolerated no arrivistes. “Two of my punches are enough for any gentleman,” he would say serenely, “and I'll have none others in the Bank Exchange.”
He meant it, too, about the two drinks to a customer. If a favored patron like Fire Chief Scannell or James Flood, the Nevada bonanza king who was himself once a saloonkeeper of note (both of them were known tosspots), wanted more, he could walk around the block, thus qualifying as a new customer. When millionaire John Mackay, perhaps the richest man in America at the time, wanted a third, he like everyone else raked his silk hat off the stag-horn rack, walked demurely around the block, and returned to get if. Nobody took liberties with Nicol.
It wasn't long before the ritualistic imbibing of Pisco achieved wide fame. Passengers of distinction who arrived from Panama aboard the Pacific Mail steamers Strode down the gangway and told cab drivers in resolute tones to take them to the Bank Exchange; they could register at the Palace after they had presented their credentials to Duncan Nicol. After 1869, when the steam cars came through from Omaha in a miraculous five days and patrons of the Central Pacific Railroad in Inverness cloaks and Sherlock Holmes caps were brought over from Oakland, as they are to this day, on the ferry, the first stop for knowing travelers was still the Bank Exchange. What Twenty One is to New York, or the Pump Room to Chicago, the Rank Exchange was to San Francisco celebrities in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
Pisco came into the fullest flowering of its celebrity, became a generic term, and entered the local language. A writer in the California Alta elegantly referred to a drunken character as “more than piscoed.” Neill C. Wilson, the western historian, coined the simile “as comfortable as a Pisco jag.” Scores of lesser places advertised ' “The Original Pisco Punch,” but Nicol, serene and secure in unimpeachable supremacy, smiled on the competition and steadfastly kept the secret of the greatest mixed drink of the age.
The speculative contents of a Pisco punch were as much a conversation piece of San Francisco as its undeniable authority, its guileless approach, and its invariable triumph over the partaker who partook too well. Topers who managed to countervene the two-drink regulation, or who were susceptible to this maximum allowance, lapsed into unconsciousness with the docility of sleepy kittens, wreathed in smiles and dreaming heavenly dreams. Nobody ever got fighting drunk on one of Nicol's punches. On the contrary, communicants acquired a perhaps unwonted courtliness of manner; benevolence radiated from features usually stern, noted curmudgeons were gentled into fraternal attitudes of good will. Under its spell, misers donated liberally to good causes. The Pisco drinker was at peace with himself and with the world around him.
Nicol gradually achieved international fame. Of the Bank Exchange special, Rudyard Kipling wrote: “I have a theory it is compounded of the shavings of cherubs' wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of the lost epics of dead masters.” Before Kipling, Thomas W. Knox had written: “The second glass was sufficient, and I felt that I could face smallpox, all the fevers known to the faculty, and the Asiatic cholera, if need be.” Lesser singers have hymned Pisco in less Arcadian cadences bin with no less veneration.
The Bank Exchange in Nicol's consulship was, according to all contemporary testimony, quite unlike most of the well-upholstered San Francisco bars of its age. No barroom nudes profaned its hallowed walls. The décor was of a classic austerity commensurate with the exalted status of management and guests. Tessellated black-and-white marble was on the floor, the bar was of simple polished walnut, steel engravings of irreproachable theme adorned the walls. The Champagne buckets were of sterling silver and the handles of the beer pulls were made of authentic Wedgwood china.
A free lunch of fabled variety and viands in keeping with the character of the Bank Exchange were served daily from an enormous mahogany table in the middle of the main room. Awed customers remarked that the steel engravings in the back room-scenes of the French Revolution-were identical with the ones in the robing room of the House of Lords in London, and were valued at fifteen hundred dollars each by connoisseurs of such matters. The bar had been worn smooth at its outer edge by generations of drinkers, and old-timers were fond of recalling how. in the sixties and seventies, its well-to-do patrons often varied their noontime dice games for drinks by side bets for gold double eagles piled in neat stacks among the Piscos.
Duncan Nicol and the Hank Exchange remained honored institutions in San Francisco, as nearly immutable fixtures as mortality allows, until well after the fire of 1906. Pauline Jacobson, quoting from an old-timer in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1912, describes the remarkable uniformity of performance on Duncan's part even though his hands were by now trembling with the years. “E-v-e-r-y one of them is mixed the same.” deposed the old-timer. “I had nine of them punches once and e-v-e-r-y one of them was mixed the same.” (Duncan must by that time have relaxed his mandate of two to a customer.) “If you came there for thirty-five years, every one of them would be mixed the same.”
And so we rake leave of Duncan Nicol, gentleman, perfectionist, austere acolyte of a noble priesthood, who could have flourished only in San Francisco's golden noontide, and who will remain forever among her most durable legends.
On the true contents of the mysterious Pisco, who shall speculate with authority? Until only a few years ago a saloon calling itself “The House of Pisco” did business among the honky-tonks in Pacific Street and served a not unrefreshing arrangement which the management maintained was the True Sacrament as first devised by Nicol a full century ago. The drink wasn't a bad one. and contained pineapple juice, and what passed in those days for Pisco, bur it embodied none of the magical qualities associated with the legend of the hank Exchange, and a few of them served to induce torpor without exaltation, something like the effect of a slug at the base of the neck.
Only recently a lineal successor to Nicol, Jack Koeppler of the Buena Vista Café in San Francisco, who has proved himself worthy of his noble heritage as an innovator by first launching Irish coffee on the American market, prevailed upon a fellow San Franciscan, Kenneth Prosser, to reveal to this writer what purports to be the recipe of the True Elixir. Mr. Prosser swears on a formidable stack of assorted books that the following recipe was recorded in his late father's own handwriting and may be taken as Revelation. It comprises 2 jiggers of Pisco, 2 jiggers of white grape juice, I teaspoonful of pineapple juice, and I teaspoonful of absinthe, Pernod, or Herbsaint.
The problem which presents itself, even with this formula in one's possession, is of course the procurement of the Pisco on which research must be based. A recent inquiry failed to disclose a single bottle of the essence.
And even assuming the prescription to be accurate, what was the secret of compounding the ingredients, the secret that required a good ten minutes of the master's time and the Special skill of his matchlessly knowing hand?
Perhaps it is best not to delve too far into forbidden lore. Let us rather leave the secret of the Pisco punch a holy mystery for all time to come, like the language of Etruria and the divinations of the Chaldeans, the circles of Merlin, and the expertise of those chemists who produced the vanished dyestuffs of Tyre. Let its legend hover wistful and unobtainable over San Francisco as the mists roll in around Telegraph Hill at sundown. Let it not be profaned by a generation of haste and ineptitude, but let it remain a memory to be carried through the ages and to eternity only by Duncan Nicol, his eyeglasses lodged over one car and on his face a smile of transcendant wisdom as inscrutable and timeless as that of the Sphinx.