In the 1970s, the margarita surpassed the martini as the most popular American cocktail and, in the 1980s, salsa surpassed ketchup as the most-used American condiment. Today, Mexican cuisine, in all its modified, regionalized (Cal-Mex, Numex-Mex, Sonoran Mex), commercialized, and even highly processed varieties, is as American as, well, as apple pie. It was the revolution that caused Americans to adopt several regional versions of Mexican food (and Chinese and Italian food) as a major culinary underpinning of American food. Mariano Martinez, a young Texas restauranteur, and his frozen margarita machine were at the crossroads of a revolution that took well over a hundred years to unfold. Now, here's the long version: the story of brown boxes, frozen margaritas, Mexican food in America, one man's entrepreneurial coup, and why Americans are so attached to everything represented by the machine. The short version is: The committee approved it, and a press release announcing it brought a wave of attention to this homely little brown box and its new home at the Smithsonian. I decided to go for it and made my proposal to the collections committee stating why it should come here. I made sure that he would really give us the machine that built his restaurant empire. Then I contacted the "world's first" developer and took down his story. I looked at the patent history for frozen drink makers, checked in on the repeal of Texas liquor laws for the sale of "hard" liquor, and ran down press mentions of this new drink. Intrigued, I embarked on the usual investigative process we go through when we are considering a new acquisition.įirst and foremost, I had to determine whether, indeed, this was the "world's first margarita machine." I had to look at a trail of references to the history of margaritas, which, by the way, has as many claimants to their invention as there are to hamburgers.
Robb told me that I had to go and get that machine for the museum. In that book, he told the story of a Dallas restauranteur who invented the frozen margarita machine. Robb had just written a wonderful book, The Tex-Mex Cookbook, a history of the phenomenon he calls an American regional cuisine. In the summer of 2003, in the course of developing a public program on Tex-Mex food, I got to know a Houston food writer named Robb Walsh. I am a curator who specializes in American foodways (among other things), and a member of the team that brought Julia Child's kitchen to the National Museum of American History. Why is this homely little brown box, with its sign that identifies it as the "World's First Margarita Machine," living at the Smithsonian? And why are we writing about that margarita machine on May 5, Cinco de Mayo? Here's a story about how some things come to the Smithsonian moreover, how this particular thing is connected, well, to blenders and battles, entrepreneurs and enchiladas, and to impresarios and good old American ingenuity.
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