Gold. It’s fascinated the masses for generations. It’s been called both the perfection of nature and the source of evil. It’s been a source of power and destruction. It’s inspired great beauty and corrupted the greedy. And today it’s inspiring something new. Hi, my name is Gabe Bauer and this is Top Shelf History, where we combine great stories with great drinks.
This is the Golden Empire. It is the drink I have made for you based on gold, and specifically its place in the Inca empire. And it’s made with only a few ingredients: Inca Cola, pisco, passion fruit, and egg white.
The story of the golden Inca empire is a fascinating, but very difficult to verify tale. Why? Because the Incas maintained their history by oral tradition. Much like the ancient Greek stories of Odysseus and Zeus, the Incas didn’t tell their tales through the written word. They didn’t even have a written language. Or the wheel. Or a lot of other technology that later civilizations would find indispensable. And yet, they were still able to build the largest empire in the new world before the Europeans came along.
Covering much of the Andes, the Inca empire stretched from Chile to Ecuador and Colombia. At its end, it was bigger than the Ottoman empire in 1914 and had a population of 12 million people. So how did a culture that powerful fall? Well, it all comes down to a Spanish conquistador named Francisco Pizarro, and a whole lot of gold.
Gold has always been available in abundance in the mountainous country the Incas called home. Peru is still one of the top gold producers in the world today. In 2014, they mined over 130 tonnes. We can only imagine what the Inca empire, with longer borders and fuller mines were able to discover. But the thing was, the Incas… didn’t really care about gold. At least not the way the Spanish and Indo-Europeans did. After all, it was everywhere. They couldn’t use it as currency–they didn’t have a monetary system.
No, for them, gold was reserved for religion and art. Believing the gold to be the sweat of the sun (and silver to be the tears of the moon), they became expert goldsmiths, crafting beautiful chalices, bowls, jewelry, and figurines. They adorned it with jade, their most precious commodity, to please the gods. When they sacrificed people, a practice it seems a lot of pre-Columbian civilizations thought was perfectly normal, the sacrifices (usually a boy and a girl) would take golden figurines and present them to the priests before they were brutally sacrificed.
So, yeah, they liked gold. But the Europeans loved gold. To them, it was precious. It was currency. It was power. The great alchemists who paved the way for modern-day chemistry believed gold was the perfection of matter since it was beautiful AND incredibly difficult to corrode or destroy in their experiments. It meant the difference between generational wealth and generational poverty. And Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro wanted some.
When Francisco Pizarro González landed on the shores of the Inca empire, they had already been struggling for some time. European diseases from colonial central America like smallpox had decimated their population. They had even killed the emperor, Huayna Capac. Then they killed his chosen successor, leaving his two brothers, Atahualpa and Huascar to fight for the throne in a bloody civil war. And just after Atahualpa declared victory, Pizzaro arrived. Atahualpa may have been able to conquer dissidents in his empire, but he was ill-prepared for the plans of Pizzaro and his men.
Atahualpa wanted to meet these fair-skinned men adorned in metal. He’d just won a war, after all, what threat could they really be to him? So he went to meet them in a tightly-packed town square. It was not a friendly greeting. Pizzaro and his men attacked Atahualpa and took him hostage. Realizing it was gold they wanted, Atahualpa offered them more than they could have imagined. He promised to fill a room that was 20ft by 15ft by 8ft with Incan gold and twice that with silver if they would just let him go. Quickly the treasure was gathered. While the coffers filled, Atahualpa was planning his counterattack. The Incas outnumbered the Spaniards by a lot. Once he was released, they would rise up. But the Spaniards suspected him. They knew the danger of the Incas rallying behind their emperor, and so they executed him. Soon after, Spanish reinforcements arrived in Cajamarca, and the once great Inca empire was conquered and colonized.
All this talking is making me a little thirsty, and with one golden empire gone, what say we make a new one?
This drink is as Peruvian and South American as I could make it. So when I started thinking about how to make this drink, I figured the best way to approach it would be as an Inca or Peruvian version of a Gin Fizz. So, to begin, we’ll add ½-¾ oz of passion fruit pulp. Now, fresh passion fruit is expensive. And I don’t know about you guys, but I like to keep my grocery purchases as cheap as possible. It leaves more room in the budget for visits to the liquor store. So thankfully, my girlfriend told me that frozen passion fruit pulp, known as maracuya in Spanish, is sold for much cheaper and in higher quantities than when you try to DIY it at your local farmer’s market. So, if there’s a Latin marketplace near you, go and grab this stuff! It’s from Colombia–land that was indeed part of the Inca empire so it qualifies. Plus it works perfectly and tastes really good in juices and smoothies.
Next, we’ll follow that up with what might be called (it isn’t but it might be) the national liquor of Peru, pisco. Pisco is a great mixer and has a very high alcohol percentage. It’s a little like vodka in that regard. So, you have to be careful drinking this stuff, but to be honest, I absolutely love it.
We’ll follow that up with 1 egg white to give it some frothy silkiness. Then throw in some ice and give it a good shake! Finally we’ll pour into our sours glass and look at that beautiful golden color! But, can we really call this the Golden Empire without the golden cola? Inca Cola, for those of you who don’t know, is perhaps the most popular soda ever created in Peru. It was so popular that it was actually purchased by Coca-Cola in 1999. Let’s top off the glass with some of Peru’s homemade gold and there you have it, the Golden Empire–a beautiful and stark drink for the once rich and powerful empire of the Andes. Let’s give it a try!
