Mexico
“In the 1937 ‘Café Royal Cocktail Book,’ a cocktail called a Picador is listed,” says Emily Arseneau, a bartender and brand manager for Rémy Cointreau’s Collectif 1806. “The ingredients include Cointreau liqueur, tequila and fresh lemon or lime—no salt mentioned. To me, the Margarita is such a perfect exercise in balance—the sweet, the sour, the salty, the proof. It’s harmony!” “Things like the Sidecar and Kamikaze all fall into the Daisy format, which is two parts booze, one part Cointreau [or generally orange liqueur] and three-quarters lemon or lime juice,” says a bartender and the co-owner of Brooklyn’s Leyenda, Ivy Mix. “You can mess around in that format, but it will still probably taste pretty good.” ITS TRUE ORIGINS ARE UNKNOWN Once you get past these quantifiable facts, short of finding a carbon-datable piece of paper with the recipe handwritten upon it along with a bartender’s signature, there’s no way to say who invented the Margarita. It’s no surprise there are a multitude of stories, involving actors, socialites and myriad bars and restaurants with heartfelt breast-beating stories of authenticity — some taking place in Mexico, some here in the U.S. “It’s not really a Mexican cocktail; it’s more of an Americanized, Tex-Mex cocktail,” says Mix. “You don’t drink Margaritas in Mexico; you drink Palomas.” “I think it’s fascinating that no one can pinpoint the origin of the Margarita,” says Mia Mastroianni, of West Hollywood, Calif.’s SoHo House, who’s a fixer of many woeful examples of poorly made ’Ritas as an on-scene expert bartender for Paramount Network’s “Bar Rescue.” “Such a simple cocktail could have happened in nine different places throughout the country where people said, ‘Oh, I can try it this way without the soda water,’ and it evolved into tequila, orange liqueur and fresh lime. That’s your classic Margarita.” This theorizing makes the most sense. When you consider the simplicity of the drink, the increasing availability of its ingredients, and the urge to use another drink’s structure as an influencing format, it’s far more likely that the Margarita was “invented” in multiple places by multiple people. Robert Simonson, a drinks writer and the author of “3-Ingredient Cocktails,” which devotes several pages to the enduring cocktail, found the more he pressed, the less plausible the so-called historical accounts became. “When I was doing research for my book, I started digging into the various origin stories surrounding its creation,” he says. “Most of these tales are very specific and, thus,
DAISY ROOTS Another simple fact, easily discerned via a quick clickety- clack on Google Translator: In the English language, “margarita” appears to work its way into a handy translation of “daisy flower.” Which points one squarely to the Daisy cocktail. Dating back to the 1920s, Daisies employ a spirit, citrus, orange liqueur and soda water combo, thus making it a category in which tequila fits into quite nicely. “The Margarita is just a twist on the Daisy, subbing in tequila as the main spirit,” says Philip Dobard, the vice president of the National Food & Beverage Foundation. “A lot of things were happening during Prohibition, and Americans were going to Mexico and trying tequila for the first time. Before that, it was unknown here.” If you peruse the pages of any drinks manual pre-1940s, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many mentions of tequila. When you do, it’s in exoticized terms, such as in Charles “Ramblin’ Man” Baker’s 1939 tome, “A Gentleman’s Companion,” in which the author proposes it for drinks like the violently named Mexican “Firing Squad” Special. “This drink is based on tequila,” writes Baker, “[a] top-flight distillation of the maguey plant.” The cocktail employs the spirit along with lime, grenadine, gomme syrup and bitters. But the spirit-sour-sweet part of his combo wasn’t really so far afield, and other seekers of fine drink had gotten closer still.
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