Pisco Sour
New York City’s mogul mayor discovers a Peruvian classic
By Ronnie Pupples
NEW YORK • 1886 — The mayor was Roy Warget’s most predictable regular. At exactly 6:15 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the mayor strode up to the seal fountain in the lobby of the Ashland House Hotel, took a tin of herring from his suit pocket, and threw fish to his favorite seal, Mike Byrnes. The seals living in the Ashland House lobby didn’t have names, but the mayor named one of them. And he named it Mike Byrnes.
New Yorkers had elected Mayor William Russell Grace, a son of Cork who’d made his millions in Peruvian bird shit, to lead the city in 1880. They kicked him out of office two years later and then re-elected him in 1884.
Pisco Sour
2 oz of pisco
¾ oz split of fresh lime juice and lemon juice
¾ oz simple syrup
Egg white
Add pisco, lemon and lime juice, simple syrup and egg white to a shaker (no ice) and dry shake. Add ice and shake again. Strain into a cocktail glass.
When the herring tin was empty, Grace washed his hands in the men’s room and claimed a stool — always the same stool, always surrendered by whoever had just been sitting in it — opposite Roy in the hotel’s famous Bandicoot Bar. Roy knew, of course, what the mayor wanted to drink, but he’d been instructed (by Grace) years ago to allow Grace to order his cocktail. Grace liked the sound of his voice ordering.
“What’ll it be, Mr. Mayor?”
“Say, Roy. How’s your evening so far? You know, I’d like one of those Peru drinks...the Excremento Dorada de Los Pájaros, I think it’s called.”
Grace always pretended he could barely recall the name of the cocktail he’d brought to New York from Lima. He pretended this at the Bandicoot Bar on the Upper East Side on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at the Buckingham in midtown on Saturdays, at the Albemarle Room in Gramercy on Mondays and Wednesdays, and at St. Jacque’s Tavern on Fridays. The bartenders all played along. And they knew that once Grace had the drink in hand, he’d begin the story of how he named it.
“You know, Roy. When I was a young man my father took me to Peru after the famine. He wanted to start a farm there, but he couldn’t hack it so he fucked off back to Ireland. I stayed and built a business shipping guano — you know what that is, Roy? It’s bird shit. Lots of nitrogen. Good fertilizer. I made a lot of money moving seabird shit out of South America.”
“Bird shit, Mr Mayor?” It was the same question Roy asked at this point every Tuesday and Thursday.
“Yeah, bird shit, Roy. But that’s not the point of this story. I’d go to Lima on occasion for business and I’d stay at the Gran Hotel Vera Cruz. Beautiful hotel, and the bar — Bar Pancho — is significant. Peruvian fellow, Pancho Fierro — his watercolors are hung all around the room.
“So I’m at Bar Pancho one evening and I ask the bartender, went by Luis Rojas, great kid, to make me something as beautiful as the room we were in. I wanted something kind of frothy. So Luis makes me this drink and it’s perfect because, in a clever nod to my business, he uses an egg. Not bird shit, but egg white. That’s what made it frothy! I was so excited I named this new drink the Excremento Dorada de Los Pájaros.”
“Wow, Mr. Mayor. That’s quite a name for a cocktail,” Roy said twice a week.
“Yep. And that’s what Luis said, too, Roy. He agreed we’d created a fine cocktail together and asked if he could simplify the name. He said it might be more popular with other customers if it weren’t named golden bird shit. And that it would be easier to order, and for bartenders to discuss the drink if the name was more aligned with what it was. Smart kid, Luis.”
“You mean a whiskey sour with pisco instead of whiskey, sir?”
“That’s right! He wanted to call it a Pisco Sour!” Grace said. “I said no.”
“Another Excremento Dorada de Los Pájaros, Mr. Mayor?” Roy asked, always.
“I’d love one, Roy. And why don’t you shake an Excremento Dorada de Los Pájaros for everyone in the house? It’s on the city.”
Editor’s Note: Fact-based cocktail historians claim the Pisco Sour was created at the Morris’ Bar in Lima sometime between 1916 and 1924.
SOURCES:
William Russell Grace, Captain of Industry, Captain of City (New York: Paknel Grant & Sons, 1902)
Luis Rojas, Rich American Idiot: A Novel, trans. Bella James (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1919)
Midge F. Sullivan, Guano Chapeau: 1001 Whimsical Uses for Animal Excrement (Chicago: Riverbank Press, 1994)
Contributors Notes:
Ronnie Pupples teaches Dreamscapeture at Mollysapp Community College on the edge of western Vermont where he’s also maintained a water taxi business for the last 14 years. He is a British citizen and is a regular contributor to British Writers Quarterly, British Writing Is Better, and Would That We All Were British. Pupples has seen his verse published in Tapioca Review, Liver, and Sue Baten’s Shorts. He lives on a radish farm where he continues his lifelong study of ponds.
Next Week: Rusty Nail • Steelworkers find a cocktail in the sky
When two famous weirdos like WR Grace and Ronnie Pupples get together, it's simply magic, what a story. I can only hope the cocktail is .376 as good.