Peruvian Pisco Sour
House cocktail. Restaurants frequently use this term to describe their cheapest, most vapid beverage. That’s such a shame, because in my world, when those two words come together it means just one thing—a pisco sour. This tangy, lemony-lime, South American cocktail is the crux of my home bar.
But it wasn’t always so. Before my junior year of college, I’d never even heard of the pisco sour. If I had, I probably would have embarrassed myself, calling it a piss-co sour. Not a peas-co sour. Luckily, fate prevented such a misfortune—and it signed me up to spend my third year of college in Chile.
During that yearlong sojourn, I roomed with a lovely, warm, slightly worn and wrinkled, Chilean woman, Regina Egana. Gini, as we called her, made a ritual of Sunday lunches. She threw open the balcony doors of her second-story home and laid a table under a drooping orange tree. She served courses—leafy salads, slow-cooked entrees, and sweet slices of dessert. It was a ritual—and like all good rituals it had a ceremonious beginning. The pisco sour, Chile’s national cocktail.
Regina’s son-in-law, Felipe, would start early, juicing the lemons. He’d separate the viscous egg whites from their yolks and ration out powdered sugar. Then, he’d lift a bottle of pisco from the shelf. The floral, white brandy—with its faint amber hue—smelled dry, and a bit harsh, like the arid, Chilean valleys where it was made. Felipe would pour this into a cocktail shaker along with his other ingredients—and after a good shake, he’d distribute the frothy cocktail in tall, narrow shot glasses with sugared rims. I’d sip it, knowing that a good meal and long conversation were to come—a feeling that reminded me of home, even if my family was far away.
My dad must have felt the same way when he visited Chile that year, because shortly after his return to the United States, he adopted the pisco sour as his house cocktail. If you are invited to our home for a Fourth of July barbecue, you’ll probably toast the most American of celebrations with a sweet-tart, southern-hemisphere libation.
This year, I finally moved in to my own home. It isn’t actually the first spot I’ve lived in as an adult. (There have been a handful of those.) But it is the first one that I had no intention of leaving for a job, a boy, or perpetual wanderlust. In honor of the move—and to inaugurate my tiny kitchen, I pulled a bottle of pisco out of the liquor cabinet. Unlike Regina, Felipe, or my dad, I didn’t make the Chilean version of the cocktail. Instead, I whipped up a Peruvian pisco sour. Years of travel (during one of which I wrote a guidebook of Peru) taught me that Chile’s northern neighbors make a more refined version of the sour. I squeezed aromatic key limes into a pulpy liquid and shook the juice with fresh egg white; smooth, completely clear pisco; and sweet simple syrup. I sprinkled it with few dashes of bitters (for color contrast and to dilute any egg flavor).
Finally, when I was done, I served it up to friends and together we enjoyed my house (warming) cocktail.
2 Comments to “Peruvian Pisco Sour”
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I love this recipe. Great site!
Wonderful, Brandon. Glad you like it!