How The Margarita Was Invented
Like chocolate chip cookies, LSD and potato chips, the margarita was invented by total accident.
It started with a Daisy — a cocktail made with a shot of liquor, lemon juice and some orange cordial — that was already a standard a few years after it was created in the early 1870s at Fred Eberlin’s New York City bar.
The earliest Daisy was made with whiskey, shaken and strained into a cocktail glass and topped with soda. Essentially, it was a modified sour. Fast forward to Prohibition, when it was easier to find your drink at bars outside of the U.S., and Henry Madden makes a delicious mistake.
At some point in the mid-1920s, a customer walked up to Henry Madden, the bartender at the Turf Bar on Main Street in Tijuana and asked for a Gin Daisy. “In mixing [the] drink,†as he told a reporter in 1936, “I grabbed the wrong bottle†— the tequila bottle. Result: “The customer was so delighted that he called for another and spread the good news far and wide.†By the mid-1930s, the drink was all over Mexico… [The bartender] might just put a salt rim on the glass, since the orange liqueur Daisy is a close cousin to the Sidecar, with its sugar rim, and everybody knew that you drank tequila with salt back then. And he might just call the thing a “Margarita,†since that’s the Spanish word for “Daisy.â€
