Real Woman's Margarita at Barrio Grill, 135 S.Sixth Ave.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You may know a lot about tequilas and margaritas, but do you know where margs got their start? Wall Street Journal columnist Eric Felten gives a little history lesson on the cocktail’s obscure origins.

In 1939, the stodgy textbook house McGraw-Hill had a manuscript they didn’t quite know what to do with – a scathing satire on outmoded American education called “The Saber-Tooth Curriculum.” The book purported to be the transcript of an epic lecture given by a preposterously pompous professor named J. Abner Peddiwell. McGraw-Hill’s conundrum was that, though they thought the book just might sell, they worried the mockery would offend their core clientele.

You can’t blame them for being a mite concerned. It isn’t in a lecture hall that the book’s fictitious professor delivers his exegesis on prehistoric educational principles. Rather, he holds forth in a Tijuana bar, his loquacity fueled by a staggering succession of Tequila Daisies. When Peddiwell first appears, he is stentorious in his condemnation of alcohol. But he strikes up a conversation with the author, who commends to him the benefits of “tequila in the form known as the tequila daisy,” which “stands supreme as an integrator of the human personality.” Intrigued, the professor announces “I will have one of those tequila daisies.” A few dozen drinks later, Peddiwell finishes explaining why stone-age educators persisted in teaching their students how to scare away tigers with fire, generations after the last saber-tooth had been scared away.

McGraw-Hill decided to play it safe, printing just a small run of the book. The publisher quietly stacked them on the end of their display table at the convention of the American Association of School Administrators, meeting that year in Cleveland. “The Saber-Tooth Curriculum” caused a sensation. Time magazine reported that “Lionized by convention delegates was the supposed author of this spoofery, tousle-haired Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin,” a cowboy-turned-college-administrator “who can roll two cigarets at once.” The newsweekly failed to report, however, the number of Tequila Daisies served at the convention hotel’s bar.

The Tequila Daisy – a mix of tequila, citrus juice and grenadine served over shaved ice – was the first truly popular tequila cocktail, and a natural derivation from the Gin Daisy and Whiskey Daisy. The cocktail achieved enough currency that a B-24 Liberator crew, flying missions to support the D-Day invasion, nicknamed their bomber “Tequila Daisy.”

But a decade after the war, the Tequila Daisy had disappeared, supplanted by an upstart cocktail called the Margarita. No one knows quite where or how. Among the classics of the cocktail bar, the Margarita is something of a latecomer. And yet, though of relatively recent vintage, the origin of the Margarita has been every bit as obscure as that of drinks a hundred years its senior. Not that there haven’t been plenty of paternity claims.

Among them was restaurateur Carlos “Danny” Herrera, who said he invented the drink in 1947 for chorus-girl-turned-socialite Marjorie Plant, widow of Broadway playboy Phil Plant. Herrera even had an elaborate story about how “She was allergic to most liquor, and the only thing she ever drank was tequila.” Not wanting to appear to be a hard-drinker, she asked Herrera to mix her tequila up into a cocktail of some sort. He added lemon juice and tried, first, banana liqueur then cherry liqueur to sweeten it up: “No good. Then I tried Cointreau, an orange liqueur, and that was it.” It’s a good story, but doesn’t explain why she wouldn’t have just ordered a Tequila Daisy.

Others asserting parentage have included a San Antonio society matron named Margaret “Margarita” Sames, and Beverly Hills bartender Johnny Durlesser, who staked his claim very early in the game. In 1955 he told the Van Nuys News that he had invented the Margarita way back in 1937 and had even entered it in a cocktail competition, winning third place (a showing of which there is no record).

The first evidence of the basic Margarita recipe comes, of all places, from England. The 1937 “Cafe Royal Cocktail Book,” published in London, included a drink called the Picador, made of tequila, Cointreau and lime juice. But the first appearance in print of a drink actually labeled a “Margarita” is the December 1953 issue of Esquire magazine: “She’s from Mexico, Señores, and her name is the Margarita Cocktail.” Esquire cooed that, “she is lovely to look at, exciting and provocative.” A year later, L.A. Times columnist Gene Sherman was about 20 miles south of the border at Baja’s Rosarito Beach, and reported that “In the afternoon you sip a Margarita and gaze pensively across the wide strand.” Sherman appears to have been the first to suggest that the drink was named for some or other “sultry lady who was the toast of the foreign colony,” but then he allows that the drink isn’t so far from being a “Daisy,” the word for which in Spanish, just happens to be “margarita.” I think that in this aside Sherman hit on the truth, that the Margarita didn’t replace the Daisy, but rather, evolved from it, both in name and content.

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Margarita
2 ounces blanco tequila

1 ounce Cointreau

3/4 ounce fresh lime juice

salt, to taste to rim glass (optional)

Combine ingredients and shake with ice, then strain into a stemmed cocktail glass or champagne saucer that has been lightly rimmed (or not) with salt.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

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MORE ON MARGARITAS

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Rare is the Hollywood western that doesn’t include the stock character of bartender. A dour presence, he quietly polishes glasses, pushes straight whiskey and ducks behind the mahogany when the fighting starts.

But this vision of the frontier saloon-keeper sells them short: Some of the most colorful characters of the Old West were the anything-but-dour men behind the bars.

Drinks historian David Wondrich sets the record straight in his new book, “Imbibe!,” a tribute to the legendary 19th-century bartender Jerry Thomas.

Wondrich quotes one amazed observer of rough and rowdy California that the saloons had “purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco . . . and prettier courtezans” than anyplace in the country: “California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America.”

Presiding over the best bad things were the “professors” of the bar – flamboyant fellows with brocaded waistcoats and flashing diamonds who mixed fantastically elaborate concoctions.

They were admired as men of property and professional accomplishment.

The most illustrious of the lot was Thomas. As a young man he traveled to California after gold was discovered there in 1849 and soon realized the handiest veins of gold were to be found in the pockets of the miners, who would pay princely sums for those best bad things.

Thomas returned East after a few years with a small fortune earned mixing drinks for the Forty-Niners, and soon opened what would become one of the most popular bars in New York.

He covered the walls with original artwork, including a large collection of Thomas Nast cartoons, and mixed fabulous drinks while keeping up an entertaining banter.

During his life, Thomas was profiled in various newspapers, and upon his death in 1885, he was fondly eulogized by the New York Times.

But for all his celebrity, Thomas would likely have been forgotten if not for his groundbreaking “Bar-Tender’s Guide.”

“Thomas did something no American bartender had ever done before,” Wondrich writes.

He “put the unruly mass of formulae that every skilled mixologist carried around in his head down on paper.”

The book, also known as “How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant’s Companion,” became the core canon of every bartender’s education, with its exhaustive categories of punches, flips, fixes, cobblers, juleps and, yes, cocktails.

Because Thomas was the first to write most American drink recipes down, he was mistakenly credited with having invented many of them (it was a mistake that Thomas did his best to encourage).

But Wondrich is able to identify with confidence only one cocktail as having originated with the Professor himself – the Japanese Cocktail, a mix of brandy, orgeat (almond syrup) and bitters in 1860 to commemorate the ballyhooed and bibulous visit of the first Japanese embassy to America.

Thomas created the Japanese Cocktail – brandy, orgeat (almond syrup) and bitters – in 1860 to commemorate the ballyhooed and bibulous visit of the first Japanese embassy to America.

Japan sent some 170 diplomats, bureaucrats, samurai and servants to the States, ostensibly to get the president’s signature on an English-language copy of a treaty. Of the many amenities the ambassadors experienced, none was embraced with quite as much enthusiasm as drink. The Chicago Tribune reported that the Japanese didn’t miss their sake, as they were quick to “exchange it for Champagne and other wines, and rum, whisky and brandy.” One of the envoys, Fukuzawa Yukichi, recounted in his memoirs how startled they had been upon first being served sparkling wine: “When a bottle was opened, it exploded with a frightening noise.” Even stranger to them was the ice that was served in the glasses to chill the champagne. “Some were frightened by the floating objects and spat them out; some were loudly crunching on the cubes.” They didn’t realize it was just ice, wrote Yukichi, because “we didn’t know they could have ice in such warm spring weather.”

While staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington, the younger ambassadors would “slip into a room to enjoy a julep.” A reporter for the Boston Journal complained that it was hard to gather news because “as they imbibe and become loquacious they forget their English and grow communicative in unintelligible Japanese.” Even so, Champagne quickly became the legation’s drink of choice, and rather expensive Champagne at that. When New York threw a grand ball in the ambassadors’ honor, the wine bill alone was more than $20,000 – or about half a million in today’s dollars. The New York Times griped that the crowd had been “ankle-deep in Champagne,” and grumbled that giving the Japanese a taste for Champagne had only benefited “French commerce.”

At least Jerry Thomas was doing his part to instruct the Japanese legation in the signature American art of mixing drinks. When in New York, the legation stayed at the Metropolitan hotel, just a few blocks from Thomas’s saloon. Chances are an ambassador or two tried the drink created in their honor.

The Japanese Cocktail – with its use of the rather exotic-tasting orgeat (pronounced or-ZHAH) – pushed open the possibilities of cocktails, helping what was then a narrow category of quaffs begin its evolution from a simple thing of liquor, sugar and bitters into the very definition of the American mixed drink. Though the Japanese Cocktail didn’t survive Prohibition, it’s worth reviving. And it’s easy to make – though if you want to mix it up in a fashion befitting the Professor himself, you might want to get a set of diamond cuff links.

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Japanese Cocktail
2 ounces cognac

1/4 ounce orgeat (almond syrup)

2 dashes Angostura bitters

1 slice lemon peel

Muddle lemon peel in orgeat and bitters in the bottom of a short tumbler. Add cognac and ice, stir, and serve. Or, shake all with ice and strain into a stemmed cocktail glass.

When critic David Ewen addressed George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in his 1944 book “Men of Popular Music,” he likened it to other essential products of the American imagination, including the skyscraper and the striptease. Better yet, he declared that Gershwin’s signature composition was “as native in its flavor as corn-on-the-cob, or a hot-dog, or a Manhattan cocktail.” High praise indeed – for Gershwin and for the Manhattan, a drink that deserves its reputation as a benchmark of American ingenuity. It’s a particularly apt metaphor: Just as “Rhapsody in Blue” combined the musical sensibilities of Storyville and Symphony Hall, the Manhattan mixes the everyman liquor, whiskey, with a refined wine aperitif, vermouth, for a cocktail comfortable in circles high and low.

Even the Manhattan’s competing creation myths straddle the demographics of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The most repeated story is that Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie, invented the Manhattan for a party at the social home of New York’s Democratic political establishment, the Manhattan Club. A plausible claim of paternity has also been made for “a man named Black, who kept a place 10 doors below Houston Street on Broadway.”

Though the Manhattan has often been thought of as a rye whiskey cocktail, drink historian David Wondrich notes that of the first four published recipes to specify a type of whiskey, two called for rye and two for bourbon. So use either in good conscience. As for the vermouth, both of my favorite sweet vermouths are made by Carpano. Its Punt-e-Mes is robust and earthy and stands up to about three parts whiskey; its Antica Formula is refined and elegant, and works best with two parts whiskey.

Bitters are a must, and you can’t go wrong with Angostura. But some old recipes (including the Manhattan Club’s) call for orange bitters. I like Manhattans with double dashes of each.

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Manhattan
2 ounces rye whiskey or bourbon

3/4 ounce to 1 ounce sweet vermouth

2 dashes Angostura bitters

2 dashes orange bitters

Luxardo brand marasca cherry cherry or orange peel, to garnish (optional)

Shake with ice and strain into a stemmed cocktail glass. Garnish with cherry or orange peel.

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Drambuie has long had a claim as a drink of the rich and sophisticated. Legend has it that the liqueur had its first champion in Bonnie Prince Charlie, who handed off the secret recipe to a Scottish loyalist as he lammed it to France disguised as a maid.

Introduced to the U.S. after Prohibition, the liqueur of Scotch whisky, honey and spices was quickly established as a “fascinating” and elegant tipple at swanky nightspots. When a columnist for the Hartford (Conn.) Courant jokingly suggested in 1968 that you could gauge people’s affluence and social status by the quality of their trash, he assigned high points to Drambuie empties.

And yet somewhere along the way, the liqueur seemed to lose its luster, as the signature Drambuie drink – the Rusty Nail – fell into disrepute.

Combining Scotch-based Drambuie with Scotch doesn’t require a doctorate in mixology, and the drink was around long before it was christened a Rusty Nail. Like B&B for a drink of Benedictine and brandy, a glass of Drambuie and Scotch was originally known as a D&S. But somewhere in the late ’50s or early ’60s, the concoction gained its new name and a new fashionability. The drink became enough of a phenomenon that in 1965 the Drambuie company trademarked “Rusty Nail” as a drink of Scotch whisky and the liqueur.

The Rusty Nail was a favorite of swingers – that last gasp of finger-poppin’ decadence before hippies displaced hipsters. The drink has never fully escaped that dubious association in America.

And yet, the Scotch whisky liqueur category that Drambuie dominates has still managed to attract new contenders. Macallan is selling a sweet dram called Amber, and an upstart Scottish firm, the Leith Liqueur Co., will soon be exporting an alarmingly pink whisky cordial called Strawberry Kiss.

As you might guess from the names of these offerings, the new whisky liqueurs have a target audience, and it isn’t men. There are marketers of Scotch who think that women can be wooed away from vodka-based candy-tinis only by being given Wonka-fied whisky.

Whichever brand you use, to make your Rusty Nail, be sure to up the proportion of whisky to liqueur well beyond the original 1:1 ratio.

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RUSTY NAIL
1 1/2 ounces Scotch whisky

1/2 ounce Drambuie or your favorite whisky liqueur

Combine with ice in a short glass. Some prefer to float the liqueur on top of the whisky. Garnish with lemon peel.

Where do new cocktail recipes originate?

Often from cocktail contests, which have a long tradition. One of the first, held in 1928 in Paris, was called the “Grand Prix du Cocktail,” and included such contestants as racy Fauvist painter Kees Van Dongen and the wildly prolific playwright and filmmaker Sacha Guitry. At the end of Prohibition, California’s Del Monte Hotel held its own cocktail competition, with entries from celebrities such as actresses Carole Lombard and Marlene Dietrich and author Sinclair Lewis.

But since those days, most drink meets have been the province of professionals, as with the contest held to select an official quaff for this year’s Tales of the Cocktail, a festival held every July in New Orleans . This year, Stacey Smith, a bartender at GW Fins restaurant in the Crescent City was the winner, for her Starfish Cooler, a concoction of limoncello, pomegranate liqueur, iced tea and champagne.

To find a drink that actually entered the basic cocktail canon by way of winning a contest, one has to go back to one of the first major cocktail competitions ever held. In the United Kingdom Bartenders Guild event held in September 1930 in London, Berkeley Hotel’s Tom Buttery won with the Golden Dawn, a cocktail that is rightly considered a classic.

From the start, the proper recipe of the Golden Dawn was a matter of confusion. A wire service reporting on Buttery’s triumph in the contest said that the drink was made of equal parts gin, calvados (French apple brandy), apricot-flavored brandy, orange juice, with just a dash of grenadine. The New York Times, however, described the Golden Dawn as having two parts each of gin and calvados to one part each apricot brandy and orange juice, with a dash of grenadine.

So which is right? The United Kingdom Bartenders Guild endorses the equal-proportion method, but I prefer the drink described by the Times. Emphasizing the gin and the calvados makes for a drier, and decidedly more sophisticated drink.

Of course, customers are the final arbiters in what, if any, new drink is to catch on. Which is why the British contest traditionally relied on the judgment of two men and two women drawn from the thirsty masses.

“After all it’s the customers, not we, who buy the drinks,” said 1952, “Paul of Grosvenor House” (as one of the past presidents of the guild was professionally known). “Besides, many of us prefer beer.”

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Starfish Cooler

(Adapted from Stacey Smith’s Tales of the Cocktail contest-winning recipe.)

3 ounces champagne

1 ounce limoncello

1 ounce pomegranate liqueur

1 ounce unsweetened iced tea

Muddle an orange slice and a mint leaf in a tall glass. Add ice and the other ingredients, stir and garnish with mint.

Golden Dawn

1 ounce gin

1 ounce calvados

1/2 ounce apricot brandy

1/2 ounce orange juice

1 dash of grenadine

Shake all but the grenadine with ice and strain into a stemmed cocktail glass. Drizzle the dash of grenadine into the drink.

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CHECKING THE COCKTAIL CONTEST ARCHIVES

Two of the longest-running cocktail competitions are those held by the United Kingdom Bartenders Guild and the International Bartenders Association. Going through decades of winning entries in the I.B.A. competition is like digging through an archaeological site, stratum by stratum, revealing the evolution of cocktail styles. In 1955, the champion drink was made by an Italian barman, Giuseppe Neri. Named the Conca D’Oro, the cocktail’s ingredients were standard golden age fare – gin, cherry brandy, triple sec and maraschino liqueur. It’s drinkable, but just barely. The next year, a Finn succeeded with Bacardi, Cointreau, and port; two years later, a German bartender took the trophy with Bacardi, Cointreau, and grapefruit juice. None seems to have found repeat business.

During the ’70s and ’80s, new fashions in drink pushed to the fore, with a preponderance of cocktails using banana liqueur, amaretto, pineapple juice and (ugh) blue curacao. In the last decade, the International Bartenders Association judges seemed to have succumbed to morbid sugar cravings. For example, the 2005 victor was the infelicitously named Strawberry Night: Belgian bartender Sergio Pezzoli added passion fruit liqueur, green apple liqueur, passion fruit juice and strawberry juice to vanilla vodka and somehow still failed to produce a drink of sufficient sweetness; thus the recipe calls for the addition of sugar syrup (and a shot of insulin for good measure).

Head to the original El Charro Café (above), 311 N. Court Ave., or any of its other three other locations for red <em>sangria</em> by the glass.

When I heard that a friend of mine, Jan Boyer, was flying to visit his mother, Josefina Clara Alberti, in her native Spain, I asked him to bring me back something from his trip – his mother’s recipe for sangria.

Jan soon sent me an e-mail from his mom’s house, where a heated debate on the merits of competing recipes had just ended. Also visiting Jan’s octogenarian mother was an old friend of hers from Mexico, where sangria is a quite different concoction than it is in Spain.

The recipe championed by Alberti was solidly in the Spanish tradition – wine, brandy, assorted sweet fruits, sugar and soda. Her friend Susana Manterola insisted on wine, lime and sugar. Who was right? We’ll see.

The big draw to the Spanish Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair wasn’t the paintings by El Greco, Goya and Velazquez, or even a trio of Picassos, a pair of Dalis and a Miro. It was the sangria.

The Spanish drink and the entrees, too, were so successful that when the fair was over, one of the restaurant managers, Alberto Heras, stayed on in New York and opened a restaurant called “The Spanish Pavilion.” It was a hit, and sangria enjoyed a brief burst of fashionability. In a 1966 article on “What’s In,” Time magazine declared that classic cocktails had been shown the door: “Old-fashioneds these days are oldfashioned. Manhattan has become a tight little island without Manhattans.” Vodka drinks were all the rage, it seems, and “Sangria, a Spanish punch combining red or white wine with fruit syrup and seltzer, has made a host of converts.”

But by the 1970s sangria had developed a reputation as the sort of drink favored by impoverished grad students – a way to make plonk palatable. When Frank Schoonmaker, in his 1970 “Encyclopedia of Wine,” wanted to describe the sad state of a Spanish wine called Priorat, he dismissed it as being “often used in sangria and other wine punches.”

The recipe that was used by the restaurants of the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Fair makes for a very dry and elegant sangria. To one bottle of red Spanish wine was added a couple of ounces each of Spanish brandy (which is fuller and nuttier than cognac) and Cointreau, one lemon and half an orange cut into slices, a couple of dozen ice cubes, 12 ounces of club soda and only two tablespoons of sugar.

But a slightly sweeter and fruitier sangria is more satisfying. And that’s the sort I got when I mixed up the recipes given to me by Jan’s mother and David Bueno, sommelier at Taberna del Alabardero in Washington, D.C. Both call for using a sweet lemony soda such as 7UP instead of club soda. Both call for more fruit – diced peaches, apples and oranges. And Bueno’s version adds a couple of ounces of peach liqueur. The result is an absolutely delicious summer cooler.

What of Manterola’s Mexican sangria recipe, which is also common to the West Indies? I have to admit I was leery, and my instincts proved decidedly wrong. Though I prefer the sort of sangria made by Taberna del Alabardero and Jan’s mother, the simple wine, lime and sugar version from Mexico is a worthy alternative.

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OLD PUEBLO SANGRIA

CASA VICENTE 375 S. Stone Ave., 884-5253

Details: It is closed for vacation through Aug. 8 (reopening Aug. 9), but has red or white sangria by the 1-liter carafe or “large” pitcher.

EL CHARRO CAFES • 311 N. Court Ave., 622-1922; • 4699 E. Speedway Blvd., 325-1922; • 6310 E. Broadway, 745-1922; • 100 W. Orange Grove Road, 615-1922

Details: All of this Tucson landmark’s locations offer red sangria by the glass: 100 percent fruit juice, red wine served on the rocks.

J BAR 3770 E. Sunrise Drive, 615-6100

Details: It sells its sangria from an “ancient J Bar recipe” by the glass.

RED SKY CAFE AND CATERING 2910 N. Swan Road, 326-5454

Details: As one of its summer specials, for its Latin-inspired Wednesday Date Night & Dancing ($35 per couple), the menu includes a “bottle” of sangria.

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Sangria

(Adapted from Taberna del Alabardero and Josefina Clara Alberti)

1 bottle Spanish grenache wine

2 ounces Spanish brandy

2 ounces Cointreau

2 ounces peach liqueur

1 peach, peeled and diced

1 green apple, peeled and diced

1 orange, peeled and diced

1 pinch ground cinnamon

6 ounces orange juice

4 ounces Sprite or 7UP

Soak the fruit in the liquors for up to a day. When ready to serve, add wine, cinnamon, orange juice and soda. Pour over ice into tumblers.

Makes about 8 servings.

Mexican Sangria

(Courtesy of Susana Manterola)

Half a bottle of good Spanish red wine

juice of 3 limes

peel of one lime, grated

2 tablespoons sugar

Combine in a pitcher with a dozen ice cubes, and let sit until all the ice is melted. Serve.

Makes about 4 glasses.