Argentine ingredients

Spirits
1

I’ve been (finally) really drilling into Pichin’s Tragos Magicos and I’ve been delighted and challenged by some of the ingredients. I’m hoping some of our South American members can help me out, here.

limón
Pichin uses a lot of limón but does not seem to differentiate between limón amarillo and limón verde, and Argentina appears to produce a lot of both. (He surprisingly does invoke the word “lima” in the front matter, but not in the recipes.)

aguardiente de Catamarca/aguardiente catamarqueño
My guess is this is aguardiente de uva—something pisco-like?

caña seca
caña de damasco
caña de durazno
cañas quemadas
Exciting that Pichin has an entire section of caña drinks. My expectation is these are sugar cane aguardientes, with the caña seca being a straight up distillate (cachaça-like?). Caña de damasco and caña de duration would be cañas de fruta. I can only guess at caña quemada, but maybe caramel-flavored/colored?

vermouth blanco tipo americano
Is there/was there a particular white vermouth in Argentina?

bitter rojo
Presume this is a reference to Campari or an Argentine Campari-esque red aperitif liqueur? Surprising no brand call.

licor monastique
Clearly not Chartreuse, so maybe one of the mid-Century faux-monastic herbal liqueurs like Bols’ or the stuff from Portugal? Or maybe there was a local Argentine product that was/is common?

licor Kermann verde
I presume this was a pastis. (Someone seems to have revived the brand in recent decades.)

licor amarillo
Another case where no brand call is surprising. Obviously an herb-infused liqueur or aguardiente, but could be so many different things.

refresco de grosella
refresco de frutilla
I presume these are bottled soft drinks that are popular in Argentina?

anís seco and anís dulce
Must be dry and sweet anisettes, perhaps Anis Del Mono?

jerez
There’s a lot of sherry throughout the recipes, but they are not specific what sort of sherry Pichin would be reaching for.

whisky
There’s a whisky cocktail section—would these all be scotch drinks?

5 Likes
2

Aguardiente de Catamarca, at least, is indeed from the same gene pool as Peruvian and Chilean piscos and Singani. It’s from the northwest part of Argentina, right over the border from the pisco-making regions of Chile. It’s lovely stuff and should be better known and distributed.

1 Like
3

That would be Americano as in Cocchi Americano. The Gancia Americano was huge over there.

4 Likes
4

The current Argentina cocktail scene also has its own way of doing things. Examples: the popular Cynar Julep and their particular way of preparing the Old-Fashioned. Pichin’s Clarito cocktail remains a staple.

5

Hi, Martin.

It seems that you’re on the right track regarding most of the ingredients mentioned in Tragos mágicos.

limón
In Argentina and Uruguay we mainly use the yellow lemon. You’d rarely find lima in any classic Uruguayan or Argentinian cocktail book (only a few Porta Mingot cocktails ask for limes and a couple other cocktails in older books, mainly copied from American books).

aguardiente de Catamarca
It seems so. I remember Ariel Lombán telling me that it was supposed to be a close relative to singani/pisco. Pichín asks for both aguardiente de Catamarca and caña de Catamarca in his book. Eloy Otero (1943) calls for grappa de Catamarca and Julio Castro (1937) simply asks for aguardiente in his Catamarca cocktail.

caña
Our caña it’s a fairly simple and straightforward cane spirit. Probably closer to a white rum than a cachaça. Bastardized for being a popular and cheap drink since colonial times, it hasn’t succeeded on changing its image, unlike cachaça did in Brazil during the last couple decades. Up until the first half of the twentieth century it served as base for various macerations of herbs, spices and fruits (some sweet, some dry). Bars would regularly showcase several bottles of caña and grappa with said botanicals inside and the clientele would go to the counter to pick their poison. In Uruguay the state own company that had the monopoly of alcohol distillation during most of the last century killed the tradition of the Bares de Yuyos by prohibiting any alteration of their products. In Montevideo only Bar Los Yuyos remains. I only found some other bars like this one in the Brazilian side of the border and also a couple of them in the interior of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe provinces.

Today caña de durazno is just a flavored caña, pretty much like a flavored vodka. Dry with just a very small amount of sugar in it. Caña de damasco no longer exists (commercially) but it followed the same principle, and you’re right on track regarding caña quemada.

vermouth blanco tipo americano
Nowadays that means Gancia and other lesser known brands. It’s mainly a less sweet and more acidic white vermouth. It is said that they used this name for drinks that didn’t fulfilled local regulations regarding the amount of wine that vermouth must have in order to be called a vermouth.

Bitter rojo
Campari it is

Monastique
That’s the Bols liqueur. Bols produced genever and liqueurs in Aregntina until fairly recently (2023 maybe?).

licor Kermann verde
Like green Chartreuse (Cazanove also produced the yellow version), not the “absinthe” that uses that brand nowadays.

licor amarillo
Not sure about this one. The yellow Kermann liqueur appears only in one recipe but licor amarillo appears several times in Pichin’s book.

refresco de grosella/frutilla
Though refresco nowadays is used for soft drinks (in Uruguay. In Argentina they say gaseosa = fizzy drink) I think that, at least up until the 1960s, was a way of referring to some kind of syrup or cordial. When he asks for refresco de chuffa he is clearly asking for horchata de chufa.

anís seco/dulce
That’s right. There were (and still are) some locally produced brands like Anís 8 hermanos. I think only the sweet kinds are being made nowadays.

jerez
Not sure but I assume its mostly dry sherry

whisky
Probably either blended scotch or something like Canadian Club.

4 Likes
6

Many thanks! This is super helpful. I think it may be time to start a discussion compiling a list of the important/essential cocktails of Argentina and Uruguay, whether created there or merely drunk there.

1 Like
7

I have been working on a comprehensive list of all cocktails published in Argentinian and Uruguayan cocktail books, booklets, and related publications (+10.000 recipes so far), including standardized versions of each recipe, as well as substitutions and clarifications for obscure or no longer existing products.

Would love to turn all of this into an app if there was any demand for it.

4 Likes
8

Eep! Ten thousand is a very large number. Sounds fascinating, but perhaps we could start with just the “classics”—the drinks people drank over and over in many places?