It Turns Out the Margarita Was Invented by Accident James Cave - The Huffington Post
go to original April 30, 2016

The margarita, as we now know it (Wiktory/Getty Images)

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. Cocktail historian and Esquire columnist David Wondrich explains what happened in a history of the margarita for Patrón:

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.”

So as you see, the margarita is not a traditional Mexican cocktail.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

Related: What Makes a Good Bar? Ask One of Mexico's Oldest Cantina Owners. (KBIA)

Related: Over 1 Million Liters of Illegally Produced Tequila Seized in Mexico (Xinhua)

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