Day and night, Lima’s street vendors carry Creole bites: sanguche de pan con chicharrón (pork and sweet potato sandwich) for breakfast, leche de tigre–cured ceviche for lunch, fire-grilled anticuchos (beef heart kebabs) for dinner and deep-fried picarones (sweet potato and squash donuts, bathed in spiced syrup) for dessert. But for liquid nourishment, limeños (residents of Peru’s capital) seek out pushcarts serving a hot herbal brew: emoliente, a curative infusion of barley water and medicinal plants. For Emoliente Piteado, a cocktail made from the drink and a shot of aguardiente, they head to the bars..

Peru’s art and stories connect emolientes to Lima’s 19th-century tisanes. Pancho Fierro’s costumbrista watercolor from 1850 depicts an Afro-Peruvian tisanera, a street vendor carrying tisanes (herbal infusions) in a clay jug on her head. And according to Ricardo Palma’s 1872 Tradiciones Peruanas, the tisanera sang a pregón announcing her 7 a.m. arrival: “La tisanera llegó, aquí está la tisanera.” Eventually, Lima’s Creole cooks transformed tisanes into the emoliente that remains a daily ritual to many.

Mauricio Vera Malpartida, a lifelong limeño and former restaurateur, had his first emoliente in 1965, when he was 5. “At a bus stop in our neighborhood there was a pushcart emolientero at night, and Mom had us drink some to warm the body,” he recalls. At home, his mother prepared emoliente in a large pot over a wood fire. “The base was barley water, plus flax, sometimes stems of chamomile or lemongrass, and a few drops of lime juice,” he says. Around 1984, when Vera Malpartida was in university, he began drinking it spiked from a pushcart vendor at Lima’s Plaza Dos de Mayo, who sold hot emoliente “piteado” with cañazo, a type of rum.

Today, municipal laws prohibit adding liquor to street drinks, there are fewer pushcart emolienteros than in years past, and it can be difficult to interview them, as speaking with the press is often prohibited by emolientero associations. One shared his story with Vera Malpartida and me, on the condition of anonymity.

“My brothers sold emoliente; that’s how I learned, and now I’ve been selling emolientes with my wife for some 40 years,” the emolientero says. At 2 a.m., he begins to prepare the base for the drink. “We toast the barley, like coffee beans, to give the emoliente its color.” As for the flax, the emolientero shuns imports and insists on using linaza nacional (local flaxseed). 

These days, emoliente pushcarts are fairly standardized—made of stainless steel, with large heated bins in the center for the emoliente base, a rack on the side for bottles with herbal liquids—such as uña de gato (cat’s claw), alfalfa, boldo (a local shrub) or cola de caballo (horsetail)—and shelves on top for sanguches. His cart’s colors and markings, as well as his uniform, indicate that he’s a member of an emolientero association—common among emolienteros today, for whom membership is part of an effort with the city and mayor to improve their business. 

By 5:30 a.m., the emolientero is at the local plaza. “My clients know I am here, so they stop for breakfast on their way to work. Gracias a Dios.” To serve the emoliente, he ladles the base into a cup and then, to mix it well and draw attention, he pours in a long stream of the herbal liquids, depending on what the customer requests. “We use it as medicine, to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes and inflammation.”

Business fluctuates with the seasons, so the emolientero adapts. “We have 20 or 30 percent less business in the summer, so we serve it cold, and offer drinks with quinoa or maca.” Supermarkets selling bottled emolientes pose another challenge. “It’s not the same. Bottled it’s like a soda, with preservatives, with an expiration date. We make the emoliente every day, and use fresh herbs.”

Regardless, he believes emoliente culture will survive. “The traditional emoliente will never be lost, because a pushcart is passed on from one emolientero to another.” He remains dedicated to preserving the tradition: “I will stay here, selling emoliente, until the end of my days.” 

Though he doesn’t serve emoliente piteado, the emolientero remembers the drink. “That was long ago, at night, until the morning, but today it’s not sold anymore.” So to find an Emoliente Piteado today, limeños have to leave the streets that birthed it.

At La Emolientería, bar manager Luis Aquije invites drinkers indoors to enjoy the Emoliente Piteado year-round. To prepare the base, his team boils water with toasted barley, cinnamon, quince, pineapple peel and fresh herbs. From there, he prepares a hot or cold Emoliente Piteado. “We combine the cooled emoliente with pisco, lime juice and simple syrup in a tin and throw it into another tin to aerate the drink before serving in a tall glass with ice,” says Aquije. 

For uses beyond the Emoliente Piteado, Aquije makes an emoliente syrup reduction to imbue other drinks, like the bar’s sours and chilcanos, with the infusion’s flavor. And the chalkboard menu, posters and murals use colorful Chicha font—the de rigueur typography of Lima’s graffiti artists—to further infuse street culture into the bar. “La Emolientería is a tribute to pisco and the emoliente, and an homage to Lima’s popular culture,” he says.

Emolientes bridge modern life with traditions from Peru’s colonial past. Whether it’s a street vendor pouring the brew hot, or a bartender serving it piteado and cold, emoliente is a plant panacea in a glass, a nostalgic, transportive drink that proves you can take the emoliente out of the street, but you can’t take the street out of the emoliente.