“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do, I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.” – Bicycle Built for Two lyrics. When we hear that song, we presume the singer is singing about the lovely lady they are fond of, but could that lady be a cocktail? The origins of cocktails are often a mystery, and who doesn’t love a good mystery? Was it the Daisy in New York in the late 1800s? Was it the Mexican showgirl in 1938? The heiress in the Baja Cantina in 1941? The Dallas socialite during her 1948 Christmas party? Was it for Peggy Lee or a customer named Margaret? Regardless of who, what, when, where, why, or how, we all love a good margarita.

The earliest claim is that sometime in the early 1870s, just around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange, the Daisy was created. The Daisy is simply a shot of booze shaken up with some lemon juice and “orange cordial” (as Jerry Thomas’s 1876 recipe puts it), strained into a glass and topped off with a splash of soda. The original version, made with brandy or whiskey, is a close cousin to the sidecar, with its sugar rim, but everybody knew that you drank tequila with salt back then, so the tequila Daisy had a salted rim. And it may have been called a “margarita,” since that’s the Spanish word for “daisy.”

According to tequila maker Jose Cuervo, the cocktail was invented in 1938 by a bartender in honor of Mexican showgirl Rita de la Rosa. As a matter of fact, Jose Cuervo ran ad campaigns for the margarita in 1945, with the slogan, “Margarita: It’s more than a girl’s name.”

Hussong’s Cantina in Baja, California, claims to have been the site of the margarita’s creation. The bartender, Don Carlos Orozco, claimed that in 1941 he named a new drink after a regular customer, Mexican-German patron Margarita Henkel Cesena. Hussong’s has enjoyed widespread popularity as the original home of the margarita ever since.

Yet another claim was that Dallas socialite Margarita Sames invented the margarita when she concocted the drink for her guests at her Acapulco vacation home in 1948. This story claims that Tommy Hilton attended the party and brought the drink back to his chain of hotels.

A columnist for the Houston Chronicle wrote that “Santos Cruz … originated the drink in the 1940s at the Studio Lounge in Galveston,” mixing it for jazz singer Peggy Lee, when she asked for “a tequila drink without a lot of mess in it.” Cruz claimed he simply made her something he’d been playing with – a tequila version of a sidecar, bringing the recipe full circle.

In December 1953, found in the pages of Esquire Magazine, was a column that read “She’s from Mexico, Señores, and her name is the Margarita Cocktail – and she is lovely to look at, exciting and provocative.” The recipe that followed was what we would recognize today as a standard “margarita, up” – tequila, lime juice, triple sec, and salt rim on the stemmed glass.

The margarita has clearly stood the test of time. Now a mainstay of every Taco Tuesday and a hit song by Jimmy Buffet, it is one of the most recognizable cocktails found in high-end lounges and dive bars alike, and it’s one that bartenders still love to make. Whether it be named for a Daisy, a showgirl, an heiress, a socialite, a jazz singer, or a bar patron named Margaret, we are all “half crazy, all for the love of you.”

MARGARITA

– 2 ounces Blanco Tequila
– 1/2 ounce Cointreau
– 1/2 ounce agave
– 1 ounce lime juice

Fill shaker with ice. Add all ingredients to the shaker. Shake for 20 seconds and pour into ice-filled rocks glasses with a salt rim and lime wheel.