Tequila Made Me Do It

Books, Cocktails, Mexico, Mezcal, Recipes, Tequila

Travel Distilled reviews Tequila Made Me Do It, a small but enjoyable book of 60 tequila and mezcal cocktail recipes, with cocktail histories and more information about Mexico’s agave spirits.

Tequila Made Me Do It has 60 tequila and mezcal cocktail recipes, and an introduction to these Mexican agave spirits.

It’s a small and sturdy hardback of 144 pages, and is very attractively illustrated with artwork by Ruby Taylor. She has a very distinctive style, as you can see from the samples shown here, and she’s illustrated other books about spirits. Her style seems perfectly suited to cocktails, glasses, and spirits.

The Author

According to the back of the book, the author Cecilia Rios Murrieta is known as La Nina del Mezcal, which you could roughly translate as The Mezcal Gal. I have to admit I’d never heard of her (my bad), but her publishers say this:

A Mexico City native, author Cecilia Rios Murrieta, AKA La Nina del Mezcal, is recognized internationally for her achievements and expertise in Mexican spirits. Her passion for mezcal and tequila led her to establish one of the first blogs about the spirit, www.laninadelmezcal.com. Cecilia was featured in Fortune’s “2016 Most Innovative Women in Food and Drink.”

The blog, however, is no longer there, though the author does have Instagram and LinkedIn accounts, and her LinkedIn profile says this:

Cecilia Rios Murrieta is a freelance writer and founder of La Niña del Mezcal, a company that promotes awareness of artisan mezcal in order to preserve the traditional production processes and position it as a premium spirit in international markets. Her passion for mezcal led her to pursue certification as a Mezcalier, and later to establish one of the first blogs about Mezcal and the culture that surrounds it. Today, she is the proud owner of a Mezcal line from Oaxaca and she continues to share her knowledge about the spirit through tastings and pairings, while creating alliances with other Mexican artisanal producers and chefs to promote Mexican cultural and gastronomic heritage.

She’s someone who clearly knows her mezcal, and also her tequila. What’s odd is that at the back of the book in the Acknowledgements the author credits 16 different people with providing cocktail recipes for the book, though you don’t know who created which tequila or mezcal cocktail as the individual recipes don’t credit anyone. That’s a shame.

Introduction to Tequila and Mezcal

Before getting to the recipes there are 15 pages of introduction, to agave spirits generally, and then to tequila and mezcal specifically. It covers how they’re made, where they’re made, the different types of spirit, and so on. I like this comment on Page 9:

While other neutral spirits acquire flavor and character from being aged for years in wooden barrels, agave spirits acquire these characteristics from years of the plants remaining in the fields, absorbing properties from the soil and energy from the moon and sun…

We also learn that with an area of 193,000 square miles, mezcal is the world’s largest PDO (Protected Designation of Origin). The introductory section ends with a whole page given over to the history of the most famous tequila cocktail of them all, the margarita, and four pages of recipes for making your own syrups and teas for the tequila and mezcal cocktail recipes that follow.

The Margarita

The recipe section begins with not one but six margarita recipes! The first is the simple classic margarita, and I’m pleased to say the author uses the exact same proportions that I do – one ounce of lime juice, one ounce of Cointreau, and two ounces of tequila. Sometimes I’ll make it three ounces of tequila, to up the strength, especially if we’ve got guests coming. No-one ever complains!

So what are the other five margarita recipes? One is for a Frozen Margarita, and another uses agave nectar instead of Cointreau. Yet another uses slightly different proportions and Grand Marnier instead of Cointreau. One is for a Tamarind Margarita, and another for a Hibiscus Margarita, showing you that this basic recipe is one that can be adapted and experimented with.

In fact there are other variations on the margarita scattered through the rest of the recipes, such as a Smoky Chili Margarita made not with tequila but smoky mezcal, and a Margarita Colada, with pineapple and coconut. It’s a versatile cocktail indeed.

The Cocktail Recipes

One really enjoyable thing about the book is that each recipe begins with an entertaining little story. It might be how the cocktail came to be created, it might weave in Mexican myths and legends, or it might bring in a bit of Mexican history. The author also likes to explain why the recipe works the way it does, and how it was concocted, before moving on to the basic Ingredients and Instructions.

The recipes also include agave versions of classic cocktails like the Mojito, Negroni, a Mezcal Old-Fashioned, a Tequila Julep, a Mezcal Mule, and a Bloody Maria!