Who Really Invented the Margarita? Five Claims, No Winner

The five claims

The most repeated story belongs to Carlos "Danny" Herrera, who ran Rancho La Gloria, a roadside restaurant outside Tijuana. He said he created the drink for a showgirl named Marjorie King, who could drink tequila but nothing else. Retellings usually date it to about 1938, but his 1992 Los Angeles Times obituary, drawing on his own words, puts it in the late 1940s.

Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada says it served margaritas first. Francisco "Pancho" Morales said he improvised one at Tommy's Bar in Ciudad Juárez on July 4, 1942, when a customer asked for a drink he had never heard of; his 1997 obituary says Mexico's news agency Notimex and many experts consider his claim the strongest.

Margarita Sames, a Dallas socialite, said she mixed it for guests at her Acapulco vacation home in 1948. And a Galveston story, told by the city's Rosenberg Library, has the Balinese Room's bartender naming a drink for singer Peggy Lee (born Margaret) that same year.

Why most of the stories fall apart

In May 1992, days after Herrera died, the San Diego Reader called the Herrera story a hoax. It quoted an allergist who found the tequila-only allergy unlikely and a CBS News veteran who said he had been drinking margaritas at Hussong's around 1940, and it traced the tale to one freelance writer whose profile other papers repeated.

Sames has a timing problem. Smithsonian magazine, citing Anthony Dias Blue's Complete Book of Spirits, reports that Cuervo's first US importer ran the tagline "Margarita: it's more than a girl's name" in 1945, three years before her party. Morales's claim is the most often endorsed, but it still rests on his own account.

What the paper trail shows

Margarita is Spanish for daisy, and the daisy was a family of drinks: a spirit, citrus and an orange liqueur or syrup. Imbibe found "Tequila Daisy" mentions in the Syracuse Herald from 1936. In 1937 London's Café Royal Cocktail Book printed a "Picador" of tequila, Cointreau and lime, in the 2 to 1 to 1 ratio still used today.

The first known recipe under the name margarita ran in Esquire in December 1953: an ounce of tequila, a dash of triple sec and the juice of half a lime or lemon. So the likeliest answer is that the drink took shape among bartenders on both sides of the border, and several people put a name on it. Our classic margarita uses blanco tequila, orange liqueur and fresh lime, close to the Picador's proportions.

The American chapter: a Dallas machine

One part of the story is well documented. Blended margaritas already existed (Mariano Martinez's father made them in a blender at his Dallas restaurant), but on May 11, 1971, Martinez served the first margarita from a machine: a secondhand soft-serve ice cream dispenser he adapted after seeing a 7-Eleven Slurpee machine.

He never patented it, and the original machine has been in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History since 2005. Sugar is what made it work, keeping the mix a soft slush instead of a block, and our Dallas frozen margarita follows the same idea.

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