Regardless of where you are in the world, you’ll be hard pushed to find a cocktail menu which doesn’t feature a version of a margarita. Sharp, refreshing and boozy in equal measure, margaritas are up there with the most popular cocktails in existence and for good reason too – they’re deceptively simple to make and even easier to drink.
There’s a lot to love about this classic concoction of tequila shaken up with lime juice, triple sec and ice and served in a glass with a salted rim, but something which makes the margarita really stand out is its versatility. Whilst a margarita or two is a fantastic way of beginning a night, it’s also a great cocktail to enjoy alongside food and is a staple of many Mexican restaurant menus in particular, as a result of its Latin American roots. Margarita drinking is by no means limited to a particular time of year but with the Mexican holiday of Day of the Dead being celebrated at the start of November, we think now is as good a time as any to have the tequila at the ready.
You might expect a cocktail as famous as the margarita to have a well-documented history but its origins are actually up for debate. Many believe the margarita to be an ancestor of the daisy family of cocktails, which is supported by the fact that the word margarita actually translates as ‘daisy’ in Spanish. Daisies were popular in the early twentieth century and involved combining orange liqueur and citrus with a spirit (usually brandy). A newspaper report from 1936 suggests that the first tequila daisy was created by accident when a barman in Tijuana picked up a bottle of tequila without meaning to, and the resulting creation soon caused a stir.
In 1937 meanwhile, the Café Royal Cocktail Book was published containing a recipe for a ‘picador’, which was almost identical to a modern-day margarita (the only difference being that either lemon or lime juice could be used) leading some to claim that it’s actually a British invention! Other stories have it that the classic cocktail was named after the person it was first created for. One such person was famous jazz singer Peggy Lee, who’s said to have asked Santos Cruz, the head bartender of the Balinese Room in Texas, to create her a tequila-based cocktail. Cruz decided to model his cocktail on a sidecar and named it margarita, the Spanish for Margaret (which Peggy is short for).
We may never know exactly where or when the first margarita was created but what we do know is that by the 1960s, margaritas were beginning to appear on cocktail menus across the US and further afield. The creation of the electric blender meanwhile, gave birth to the frozen margarita, which soon became a hugely popular cocktail in its own right. By 2008, the margarita had become the most-ordered mixed drink in the U.S, cementing itself as a cocktail for the ages.