Whence
Emoliente (barley herbal brew)
Drink

Where does Emoliente (barley herbal brew) come from?

Emoliente comes from Lima, Peru. This warm brew of toasted barley, flaxseed and herbs, finished with lime and sugar, grew out of the herbal barley waters of colonial Lima, and street vendors still sell it from pushcarts in the early morning and in the evening.

Tisanes in the City of the Kings

The Spanish brought barley water to the Americas, and records of a barley drink sold in Lima go back to colonial times, according to the historian Juan Luis Orrego. Women vendors called tisaneras walked the plazas of Lima, the 'City of the Kings', with clay pots of medicinal herbal infusions. A watercolour by Pancho Fierro from 1850 shows an Afro-Peruvian tisanera carrying a jug on her head, and Ricardo Palma recorded her morning cry: 'La tisanera llegó'.

An emolientero on every corner

Lima's cooks turned those tisanes into emoliente, and 19th-century travellers mentioned the drink in the capital. It became so popular that there was an emolientero, an emoliente seller, on practically every street corner. One vendor with some 40 years at the cart starts work at 2 a.m., toasting the barley like coffee beans to give the drink its colour. At the cart he ladles the base into a cup and pours in herbal extracts such as horsetail, alfalfa or cat's claw.

Why people think of Mexico

Warm drinks sold from street carts are common across Latin America, and many people link them with Mexico. Emoliente, though, is a Peruvian tradition that keeps changing: vendors have added new plants such as muña and aloe, and in summer, when sales can fall by 20 or 30 percent, some serve the drink cold. Peru's Law 30198 even made 20 February a national day for emoliente and other traditional natural drinks.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · andina.pe ↗ · punchdrink.com ↗ · larepublica.pe ↗

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