The name says New England -- Cohasset is a town on the Massachusetts coast -- but the drink is pure Chicago. It even rates a cameo appearance in Saul Bellow's novel "Dangling Man." Where it comes from, no one knows.

One story has it that an inventive bartender created the drink at the Cohasset summer home of a famous nineteenth-century stage actor and then took the recipe with him when he returned to the Windy City. For decades, it was associated with Ladner Brothers, a bar on West Madison Street that sold the punch in bottles and hung a sign outside that proclaimed, "Home of Cohasset Punch." And so it was, until the place was torn down in 1986.

Somewhere along the line, the whopping garnish of a peach half found its way into a very crowded drink, and there it stayed.