Picador

The Picador appears in William J. Tarling's Cafe Royal Cocktail Book, published in London in 1937, where it is listed as tequila, Cointreau, and lime or lemon juice in a 2:1:1 ratio, shaken. That recipe uses the same spirit and proportions later associated with the Margarita, but Tarling's book predates the first known published Margarita recipe by roughly sixteen years, making the Picador one of the earliest printed tequila sours of its kind. Nothing in Tarling's book records who created the Picador or why, though its name follows the bullfighting theme he gave several other tequila drinks in the same collection, such as the Toreador and the Matador.

Because the Picador so closely matches the later Margarita in build, some historians treat it as a possible forerunner, suggesting the Margarita may have been an existing drink renamed rather than invented from scratch, though this remains speculation. The Margarita itself has a disputed origin, with competing claims placing its creation in Mexico or Texas in the late 1930s and 1940s; unlike that drink, the Picador is traditionally served without a salt rim. The Picador's defining difference from the Margarita is simply this absence of the salted glass rim, along with its documented use of either lime or lemon juice.