coldhearted scientist وداد

FUN AND FLUFFY

I associate Peru with seafood, but usually we eat many forms of starch, fruit, and milk – with instant coffee and herb tea. This diet causes me to crave fried eggs. Today, fortunately, we consumed meat, vegetables, and wine, and I was fortified at last. Then we consumed an item new to me – PISCO SOUR ICE, from the current most popular gelato place, Laritza (the one in Miraflores I used to go to, which was famous in its day and made ices and ice cream from every kind of tropical fruit and left whole pieces of fruit in it, has disappeared). In any case, Pisco Sour ice is really good. I am not sure how to make it but I think that if you used a regular ice recipe, substituting Pisco Sour for the fruit, it would work.

Modifying a lemon ice recipe: dissolve a cup of sugar in a quart of boiling water and let this mixture cool. While it is cooling make a generous 12 ounce Pisco Sour. Add this to the mixture when it is cool. Freeze in a tray, stirring every now and then so that it does not freeze rock solid. The ice will be ready in 90 minutes.

This recipe is theoretical, not tested, and I need help testing and adjusting it. The hardest part is getting the Pisco Sour ingredients and making it. Alejandro is helping us with this by showing that there are easier and harder ways to make a Pisco Sour. I think one of the easier recipes would be good enough for an ice, but I insist on using limes, not lemons. And I am used to receiving Pisco Sours with cinnamon or nutmeg in lieu of Angostura bitters. But I believe the Pisco Sour ice contained neither.

SERIOUS

Is Lima, then, a viable place to live? In the long term, no, because the smog and traffic will only worsen and with any small problem the city will run out of drinking water – studies have been done which show why. People do not realize this. A minister of the government recently announced that people in the country would just have to migrate to cities so as to have access to potable water (the streams and rivers having been polluted by mining and other activities), because the country cannot afford to put a source of potable water in each town. There are numerous problems with his statement but one of them is that concentration of people in cities is not a solution to the water problem.

In the short term, I believe I could make Lima viable. It is definitely not viable in the way I have been here these last months, because where I live is too inconvenient in too many ways (it is like living in Metairie, which New Orleans people will understand). Now, they call Miraflores “Choliwood,” and the Paseo de la República reminds me of the Harbor Freeway. We can continue the Los Angeles analogies and say that a part of town everyone but me wants to live in, San Isidro, is Beverly Hills. I do not want to live there, although I would rather live there than where I do. Neither do I feel great desire for the convenient “Choliwood” (which is in other ways something like West Los Angeles), but I like Barranco, which we can perhaps call Venice. (Indeed, I have just discovered that the house I have always coveted is none other than Ricardo Palma‘s house … well, you knew already that I had seignorial tastes!)

I wonder, I wonder, about Jesús María, Lince, Pueblo Libre, and Magdalena del Mar. I like Pueblo Libre just for the name. As the Republic-related name suggests, it has nice nineteenth century buildings, and it is very convenient to my main universities. I have been told to think out of the box and consider living in one of the good parts of San Juan de Lurigancho or even Los Olivos. But where I claim I would ultimately like it is where I liked living before, Lima 1 – downtown. Many people I know speak with some pride about how they never go to Lima 1, the way Metairie and Baton Rouge people boast about their lack of interest in New Orleans. This only encourages me. I wonder.

Axé.