Margarita

The margarita's origin is not settled, and cocktail historians treat it as one of the most contested stories in mixology. Most trace its lineage to the Daisy family of drinks (margarita is Spanish for "daisy"), a 19th-century category of spirit, orange liqueur, and citrus drinks that by the 1930s was being made with tequila as the "Tequila Daisy" along the Mexican border. A 1937 British cocktail book, the Café Royal Cocktail Book by William "Billy" Tarling, included a nearly identical drink called the Picador, and in 1939 New York bartender Charlie Connolly published a salt-rimmed Tequila Sour in his Cotton Club book of mixed drinks, both predating the name "Margarita" by years.

Several Mexican and American bartenders have separately claimed to have invented and named the drink itself: Carlos "Danny" Herrera at his Rancho La Gloria restaurant near Tijuana, said to have mixed it around 1938 or 1947-48 for an actress who could drink only tequila; Francisco "Pancho" Morales at Tommy's Place in Ciudad Juárez on July 4, 1942; Danny Negrete in 1936 in Tehuacán, Puebla, who is said to have created it as a wedding gift for his brother's fiancée, Margarita; and bartenders at Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada, who date it to 1941 and tie the name to patron Margarita Henkel. Non-bartender origin stories credit Dallas socialite Margarita Sames, who is said to have mixed it for guests at her Acapulco home in 1948, an account later popularized through the Hilton hotel chain.

No single claim has been verified as definitive. The drink's modern popularity owes much to the frozen margarita machine that restaurateur Mariano Martinez built in Dallas in 1971, adapting a soft-serve ice cream machine, an invention later preserved in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.