Episode 224

If you can’t answer any or all of those questions with rapidity or certainty, don’t worry – you’re not alone. And the reason why you’re not alone is because they’re not technically answerable questions. The Margarita cocktail represents a branch of the sour cocktail family tree that constantly forks and elaborates outward from its origins. But maybe “forking” is the wrong way to describe what the margarita does. The Negroni forks into a Boulevardier, which then forks into an Old Pal and a Man About Town. A Martini forks into a Vesper and a Gibson. But a Margarita radiates, spitting out little twigs and off-shoots specific to time, place, style and culture, all with different recipes, but all bearing the same name.

I’ve always been fascinated with cocktails that seem to resist one or a few canonical recipes, cocktails so good and so easy that the point isn’t to worry about them or argue about them, but rather, to simply enjoy them. Here’s the catch with these kinds of cocktails, though: you can sip on a mediocre one and not give it a second thought, not be disappointed, but when you encounter a truly amazing one, it’s a thing of sheer beauty.

In the end, my hope is to discover the true heart of the Margarita, to understand what makes it different from all the other sours in the cocktail pantheon. The internet is littered with recipes (good and bad), history (real and speculative), and plenty of brand-sponsored misinformation. And because of that – because I couldn’t find a resource that stripped down the Margarita to its essential components and then reassembled it for me to consider, I decided to tackle that project myself.

I’m glad you’ll be with me on this journey because it begins many, many years ago, when the world was a very different place. So come along with me, and maybe pack a snack because to understand why the Margarita is such a delicious drink, we need to go back in time roughly 500 million years.

The Worm And The Margarita

The story of the Margarita, like any good story, begins with a worm. And we’re not talking about the worm in the mezcal bottle here, but a 1-millimeter-long roundworm known as C. elegans. In the days before mammals, before dinosaurs and reptiles, and before even the simplest fish swam in primordial seas, C. elegans split off from flatworms and other basic eukaryotes and started wiggling around in the mud. That is what worms do, after all. Things haven’t changed all that much in 500 million years…

But C. elegans isn’t just any wiggly, little worm – it’s something known today as a “model organism,” which is different from when your third grade teacher called you a “model student” because I have a feeling your third grade teacher wasn’t studying your reproductive life cycle or actively mapping your genome. That’s what we do with model organisms: we look at how they reproduce, evolve, and respond to various stimuli in order to understand questions about the human body that are too complicated or unethical to test on humans.

For more than 50 years now, scientists have been using C. elegans in various studies and experiments, and in 2002, it was the first multicellular organism to have its entire genome sequenced and mapped out for the world to see. One of the consequences of this work is that we can look at a gene that is present in the human genome, and then step into our genetic version of the “Way Back Machine” to see if that gene or gene family is also present in this very early, very rudimentary organism.

OTOP1 – The Sour Perception Gene

Well, it turns out that one gene family that you and I have in common with C. elegans is called OTOP1, which is responsible for our ability to perceive sour flavors. According to researchers, OTOP1 is “uniquely suited to mediate sour taste transduction” and “[is] not structurally related to any other known ion channel or transporter.”

This is all a very complicated way of saying that, to the best of our knowledge, there were little worms crawling around in the mud about 500 million years ago, and their ability to perceive what amounted to sour tastes in their environment is directly tied to our ability to taste them in our cocktails today. Maybe not exactly what you want to hear as you take your first sip of a Margarita, but I think it points toward a very deep and very essential relationship between living organisms and sour tastes.

From here, the question arises: why did organisms at any point in our evolutionary history need to know about the presence of something sour?

Well, if you can extract yourself from thinking of sour as a “taste” for just a minute, it’s a little simpler to think of an acid as just a compound with some extra hydrogen ions.

Let’s put on our chemistry hats here for just a moment – and I apologize in advance because I haven’t worn this hat since junior year of high school, and it was never one of my favorite hats. Anyway, a hydrogen atom is simply comprised of a proton and an electron, and if that electron decides it’s got better things to do, a hydrogen ion is formed. This is the simplest of all the ions because it’s JUST a proton – a single, positively-charged subatomic particle. When we measure the acidity of a solution, we use a measure called pH, which refers to “potential Hydrogen” or the “power of Hydrogen.” Either way you translate it, whenever we measure pH, the end goal is to figure out how many hydrogen ions are hanging around in a given solution. That translates to its acidity.

So if I’m a little worm hanging out in the mud 500 million years ago, or even a fish swimming around in the prehistoric oceans sometime later, and I sense a distinct increase in the acidity of my environment, I’ve got two choices, I can either ignore that stimulus, or I can respond to it. If that acidic environment turns out to be bad for me, and I stay, then I die. But if I move, then I maintain my homeostatic balance long enough to reproduce and create copies of myself that will do the very same thing when they sense a potentially harmful shift in the pH of their environments. That’s how evolution works, and that’s how certain physical traits and capabilities are passed down over eons.

Acid Perception in Primates

But let’s face it: you and I are not worms. We are not fish. We are primates. Instead of sensing the presence of acidity in an aqueous environment using receptors on the outside of our body, we need to actively ingest a substance to determine whether or not it is acidic. Now, anyone who’s ever juiced a lemon or a lime when you’ve got a cut on your hand knows that’s not strictly true, but for the purposes of sour cocktails, it remains the governing truth. Here’s professor Dan McCall from the Gettysburg Odor and Flavor lab explaining how our taste receptors identify a given taste. If you can believe it, this is from WAY BACK in Episode 7! That’s almost 5 years ago!

Tune into the full interview in the audio player to hear professor McCall’s Clip.

Notice that professor McCall isolates the way we perceive acid and salt from the way we perceive sweet, bitter, and umami flavors. This is because these two tastes operate using ion channels, rather than the slightly more specialized “lock-and-key” receptors for other tastes. To me, this connection between acid and salt seems important, especially when we’re talking about a sour cocktail often served with a salted rim.

But perhaps more important than our mere ability to perceive acidic tastes is the reason why we tend to crave or prefer them, which is almost certainly a phenomenon that occurred much closer to modern humans in the evolutionary tree of life. So in our next phase of this journey, we get to time jump more than 400 million years closer to the present day.

One possible explanation for our preference for sour flavors is that about 60-70 million years ago, the common ancestor of monkeys and primates lost the ability to produce endogenous vitamin C due to a genetic mutation. Vitamin C, of course, remains a very important nutrient for humans, and it does play a very, VERY direct role in the development of sour cocktails. But before we were mixing up grogs and punches (supposedly) to fight scurvy, and gin and tonics to fight malaria, our fuzzy forebears were stuck sourcing their Vitamin C primarily by foraging for fruits and berries.

This brings us to a fascinating little moment in the history of human evolution: the moment that primates descended from the trees and decided to stay on the ground. This “decision,” if you can call it that, is what prompted us to begin walking upright and to form social groups capable of warding off terrestrial predators. It also happens to be the historical moment where our need for vitamin C experienced a collision with our affinity for alcohol.

Here’s past guest Mark Forsyth, author of A Short History of Drunkenness, explaining the “Drunken Monkey Hypothesis.”

Tune into the full interview in the audio player to hear Mark’s Clip.

It’s also speculated that sour tastes are a kind of safety signal in rotting or fermented foods – one that says, “hey, this is probably okay to eat.” This is relevant because, as our primate ancestors foraged for the nutrients they needed, they were bound to encounter lots of ripe fruits rotting on the ground, at which point they were faced with the decision: to eat, or not to eat?

Here’s distiller Bryan Davis, who does an excellent job breaking down the complex battle between bacteria and yeast that occurs on fermenting or rotting substances.

Tune into the full interview in the audio player to hear Bryan’s Clip.

Sour Takeaways

So to summarize what may seem like a rather drawn-out tangent about the evolutionary roots of our preference for acidic tastes, I simply want you to bear in mind a few key facts as we forge ahead into the world of sour cocktails:

• First, our ability to perceive acids is incredibly ancient, and the gene family that encodes this ability was also present in worms that evolved over 500 million years ago.

• Second, our perception of acids has always been linked to our ability to survive, from sensing overly acidic environmental conditions in the ancient seas, to searching out vitamin C that we lost the ability to produce on our own.

• And finally, acidity is very often a stand-in for the “goodness” or “non-toxicity” of a substance we may wish to consume. Like the citric acid you see on the nutrition labels of almost everything at your local supermarket, It’s a preservative. And since refrigeration and advanced food preservation methods are dazzlingly new in the history of humanity, our species has historically been very reliant upon acid as a signal for potability.

These are what we might call the “pre-conditions” for the rise of the sour cocktail. Like a tinder-dry forest, they lay dormant as we leapt from worm to fish to reptile to mammal. The atmosphere began to crackle with electricity as we lost our ability to produce vitamin C, and heavy storm clouds loomed when we evolved not just a tolerance, but an affinity for the combination of sour tastes and alcohol.

Citrus And Its Role In Proto-cocktails

The question, then, is: when did lightning finally strike and cause us to start pairing citrus and alcohol intentionally and in a controlled, regimented way?

I would argue that this moment was when humans decided to strike out into an environment that we were no longer suited to survive in; when we converted forests to plank lumber and filled canvas with wind beyond the sight of any friendly shoreline. This was the age of exploration, which paved the way for merciless colonialism and global trade.

Now I know most of you are probably waiting for me to dive into a story about grog and how it was invented as a way to keep sailors from suffering from Scurvy on the high seas. This is the prevailing historical myth that gets repeated ad nauseum, but if you look at the history books, it turns out that grog was actually invented in the Caribbean, where sailors would not have to spend long periods without fresh food, and where vitamin-rich fruit was readily available.

So it wasn’t so much necessity that instigated this felicitous amalgamation of spirits, water, sugar, and citrus, but rather a combination of bad behavior and fussy palates.

The problem with the British rum ration in the 1700s (which consisted of about 4 ounces of high-proof spirits) is that it was ordered to be cut 4:1 with water (so that’s 16 ounces of water to 4 ounces of booze, which would put it roughly between 12% and 15% ABV), and we’re not talking about a nice fizzy rum highball here. We’re talking about, in all likelihood, stanky ship water. This diluting of the rum ration was conducted so that sailors wouldn’t save up their rum for several days and then go on a bender, which would almost always result in behavioral and safety issues.

So what do you do with a drunken sailor? You dilute his rum. But then you have a disappointed sailor who has nothing better to do in his spare time than dream up ways to make his rum ration taste better. This is where sugar and citrus enter the equation, and eventually the concoction became a viral hit in the naval community and beyond.

The same process occurred on the other side of the world at around the same time but using slightly different ingredients, which is what sparked the Punch craze, and the rest, it seems, is history.

The rest of the historical run-up to the Margarita elapses over a much more compressed time period than what we’ve dealt with so far in this episode. It only takes us about 150 years to move from grog and punch up through other proto-cocktails like slings and toddies, until we finally see people combining tequila, lime, and orange liqueur in a measured and regimented fashion.

The Crusta And The Daisy

To my mind, there are two very important cocktail formats that we have to thank for ushering in the age of the Margarita are the Crusta and the Daisy.

I should note, as I love to do, that the best resource for a detailed history of these and all the other cocktails between Punch and Prohibition is Dave Wondrich’s book, Imbibe! It’s call all the historical context, all the color commentary, and all the little twists and variations you could hope to explore.

The Brandy Crusta

But for our purposes, we need to begin by looking at the Crusta. This cocktail hit the scene in the 1850s in New Orleans, invented by an Italian bartender named Joseph Santini and was initially a brandy-based cocktail (although was quickly adapted to other spirits). What makes the Crusta such a compelling forebear of the Margarita is that it’s a lightly sour cocktail that contains orange liqueur in the form of curacao. The original recipe for it listed in Imbibe! Is as follows:

• 1 tsp (or about ¼ oz) gum syrup

• 2 dashes bitters

• 2 oz spirits

• ½ tsp (or about ⅛ oz) orange curacao

• 1 tsp (or about ¼ oz) lemon juice

The Crusta is not what you’d think of as a classic sour cocktail. Although it contains citrus, it definitely skews sweet. This sweetness is even further amplified by the service method from which it derives its name: the sugared rim.

When a bartender made a true Brandy Crusta, he would peel the rind from half a lemon, then run the juicy flesh of the lemon around the rim of a stemmed cocktail glass, which he then dipped into a dish of fine sugar to coat the rim. Then that half lemon rind would be placed in the glass, and the beverage would be poured in. So what the Brandy Crusta lacked in balance, it made up for in flair – and there’s nobody sitting there with a gun to your head saying you can’t mess with the acid to sugar ratio in the drink if you’d like one that suits your palate a little better than the original.

Daisy, Meet Tequila

Our other Margarita predecessor of note – the Daisy – was invented about 20 years after the rise of the Crusta in one of America’s other great cocktail cities, New York. According to Wondrich, this cocktail had a couple timing and identity issues, in that it was essentially a whiskey sour, served up with a splash of seltzer water – just barely enough justification to call it a completely different cocktail until some bartenders started playing around with orange curacao as the sweetener. The timing issue lies in the fact that “fizzes,” which were sparkling long drinks, started to really take off in popularity pretty much right after the Daisy was invented – because, hey, if you want seltzer in your drink, HAVE SOME DAMN SELTZER.

But while the Daisy was down, it wasn’t completely out. In fact, it stuck around just long enough to be served over ice and even remixed with some intriguing new ingredients, including raspberry syrup and grenadine in the 1890s. This is also when folks started to get really excited about London-style gin, which replaced aged spirits like whiskey and Dutch gin in the Daisy format, leaving us with what Wondrich refers to as the “new type” of Daisy: a spirit, some acid, and a fruity sweetener, served over ice and topped with soda water.

To round out this section on the immediate Margarita precursors, I’m gonna read a paragraph straight from Imbibe! Because, hey, it’s not one of my signature audio essays if I don’t. Wondrich writes:

It’s worth going into this much detail about the Daisy because of something that happened in Mexico while the Great Experiment [read: Prohibition] was running its course in el Norte. First off, in 1929 or thereabouts, the new American-financed gambling and golf resort at Agua Caliente, outside Tijuana, introduced its house cocktail, the “Sunrise Tequila.” Tequila. Lime juice. Grenadine. A little creme de cassis. Ice. Soda. In other words, a “Tequila Daisy,” and in 1936 this even pops up north of the border, In Syracuse, New York, of all places. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to record which kind of Daisy they’re drinking, the old-school one witch was often served in cocktail glasses with only a minimal amount of fizz, or the new-school one, like Agua Caliente’s Sunrise. This is important because of the Spanish word for “daisy.” If they were drinking them old-school, you see, they were drinking tequila, orange liqueur, lime juice (much more common than lemon in Mexico), and maybe a little splash of soda–and ordering them as Margaritas.

Join us next time for the thrilling conclusion of this epic, sour story, where we’ll learn about the disputed origins of the Margarita cocktail, as well as a couple of very important variations that will help us understand what this drink means for drinkers today.