At a glance:
Year Created: 1937, printed in 1939
Inventor: Unknown, but printed by Charles Baker, Jr.
Ingredients: Tequila, lime, grenadine, bitters
Family: Sour
Introduction:
I hate the name of this drink. “Mexican Firing Squad?” It sounds, to me, like a warm pint of tequila. It sounds like an Long Island Iced Tea with chamoy, something in the vein of the “Adios Mother Fucker” or the “Irish Car Bomb” or some other name that communicates that this drink is so strong that it will literally kill you. It also has the benefit of sounding vaguely racist, even if it’s difficult to say precisely why or how. Honestly, the name, combined with a (previously held, now fully disavowed) lack of respect for grenadine, was enough to get me to more or less ignore this cocktail for the majority of my career.
I realize now, of course, I was wrong on both counts. The Mexican Firing Squad is a terrific little drink, unusually dynamic for its simplicity, and is every inch the classic it deserves to be. Even if it sounds like something that you could get half-off weekdays between 3-5pm at Chili’s.
The Story
“It was… during a first adventure around the world that we made the agreeable discovery that all really interesting people — sportsmen, explorers, musicians, scientists, vagabonds, and writers — were vitally interested in good things to eat and drink.”
— Charles Baker Jr.
Most cocktail books, especially from the pre-modern era, were dull and dreary affairs, lists of measurements so dry you’d think they were recipes for hand-soap or communion wafers. The most vivid example of this was by a German immigrant named Hugo Ensslin, who in 1917, published a nearly imageless litany of recipes behind a solid beige cover, all under the incapacitatingly dull title, Recipes for Mixed Drinks. The actual recipes inside were fantastic and became hugely influential, but for style, context, or commentary, we’re looking at straight 0.0s across the board.
Charles Baker Jr., was different, to say the least. Baker was born in Florida and flitted around a couple random odd jobs — writer, editor, engineer, furniture store owner — before an “unexpected inheritance” at age 30 gave him enough money to become what he was truly destined to be, which was an adventurer. He booked a ticket aboard a Titanic-looking 3-stack steamer called the SS Resolute for a trip around the world, and kept traveling, on and off, for the rest of his life.
As noted in the above quote, Baker found himself irrepressibly attracted to the finer things to eat and drink. He kept a log of all such recipes, a record of his consumable travels like some kind of proto-Anthony Bourdain, and after years at sea, he ultimately stitched these into a two-volume book — one for food, and one for booze — the latter being called The Gentleman's Companion: Being an Exotic Drinking Book, or Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask.
First published in 1939, Baker’s book is an exuberant affair. He writes not only about the wonderful cocktails he encounters but how he felt about them, the places in which he encounters them, the colorful characters who made the introductions, and occasionally, the drunken consequences that ensue. He reports his liquid findings from Singapore to St. Louis to Shanghai, and seemed possessed of the type of restless energy you get from someone trying to live the most interesting story possible. He married rich, and built an Indonesian-themed house for he and his wife in Florida (they couldn’t decide between Florida and Hawaii, so they flipped a coin). He hung out with Hemingway and Faulkner and Frost. In 1954 Esquire Magazine wrote a short, glowing profile of him in which they not only call him the “foremost reporter of eating and drinking around the world” but which begins, a bit more wistfully, “If you ever wondered whose oyster the world is, meet Charles H. Baker, Jr.”
Mexican Firing Squad
In 1937, Baker found himself in Mexico City, being escorted around by “2 young Mexican caballeros whose parents mattered in official circles,” and getting annoyed of it. “We were herded into fancy, rather full places, served too warm drinks,” he says, before “we broke off by ourselves… [and] ordered things in our own way” (note: Baker’s aggravating insistence on always and forever using the royal “we” is the only real glaring weakness in his writing). He found a bar called he calls “La Cucuracha” [sic] and a cocktail he describes as the “Mexican ‘Firing Squad’ Special, which is a creation we almost became wrecked upon.”
This is all we have of the Mexican Firing Squad. As it turns out, La Cucaracha was a famous bar in Mexico City, so famous in fact that there are lots of old, 1930s menus from the place floating around for people who collect such things, but this cocktail is not on them. Was it an off-menu special from a talented bartender? An example of Baker ordering things “our own way?” We can’t know.
What we do know is that the recipe, as Baker records it, helps us understand why there are so many different modern interpretations of the Mexican Firing Squad. We can’t follow his instructions. Like so many cocktail recipes of old, this is a great set of flavors set in unacceptable proportions, as following these rules yields a Hemingway-esque cocktail, meltingly strong and punishingly tart.
Consider:
Through this lens, it’s not so hard to explain how he “nearly became wrecked upon” the Mexican Firing Squad. As a rule, “twice the booze, third the sweetness” does not a delicious cocktail make. Unless, again, you’re Ernest Hemingway.
Perfecting the Mexican Firing Squad:
It’s best to take these variables one at a time:
Proportions: This is the easiest thing to fix, as we have a standard sour template to work with — 2oz booze, and 0.75oz each of sour and sweet. Done.
Soda: Baker, to be clear, did not call for soda, yet lots of people put some in. Why?
As best I can tell, it’s because Baker called for this to be prepared in a “tall collins glass,” and it seems that some people have just assumed that because it’s in a glass that normally has soda-finished cocktails, this should be finished with soda. That said, there is only one, very narrow circumstance in which it’s better to top this cocktail with soda (see Tequila, below), and for our purposes, we can ignore it.
Grenadine: I have, in the past, rhapsodized about the superiority of grenadine with freshly juiced pomegranates (as opposed to anything you can buy in a store, which is pasteurized and less vital), and I maintain that fresh grenadine makes a life-changing Jack Rose. That said, here it wasn’t such a difference. Given the option I would happily take a fresh-juiced grenadine — the fruit is more voluptuous, and midtones fuller and plusher — but it still tastes great with bottled juice, or with a store-bought grenadine like Small Hands Foods, Liber & Co, Liquid Alchemist, and others.
Just make sure the ingredients in your grenadine are pomegranate juice and sugar. If instead you look at the ingredient list and read “high fructose corn syrup, water, citric acid, sodium citrate, sodium benzoate (preservative), red 40, natural and artificial flavors, blue 1” — looking at you, Rose’s "Grenadine” — do yourself a favor and throw it away.
Angostura Bitters: Everyone seems to over-bitter this, and I’m not sure why. Liquor.com calls for 4 dashes of Ango. I’ve seen as many as 6 dashes. I don’t even have a solid theory as to why this is — 2-3 is more than fine. Stay sane.
Tequila: This big question: Blanco (unaged) or Reposado (briefly aged)?
Baker doesn’t specify. Trying all kinds of permutations, I’ll say they’re both good, but it’s the reposado that really shines. Reposado tequila’s brief, 2-12 month nap in oak barrels files away some of the raw green notes from the agave and replaces them with broad barrel tones of oak, tannins, spice, and vanilla, and it’s the vanilla in particular that gives flesh to the tart pomegranate, balance to the drying spices of the bitters, and makes the cocktail all the more dynamic. If you use a full measure of grenadine and no soda (which is my favorite recipe), go reposado. For cocktail work, I prefer inexpensive (though always 100% agave) brands like Real del Valle, Cimarron, or Olmeca Altos, though the quality of the cocktail would scale up with a higher quality repo like Fortaleza or Don Fulano.
There is another version of the Mexican Firing Squad that’s also very good, and that’s with blanco tequila and half the grenadine. The estimable Jeffrey Morgenthaler riffed a bit more literally off Baker’s original specs, kept the grenadine measurement where it was (not enough), and supplanted it with a bit of simple syrup. This version, in which grenadine is a relatively minor character, is optimized not only with blanco tequila but also topped with a bit of soda. It’s very good, I just happen to like mine better. His full recipe here.
The Mexican Firing Squad
2 oz. Reposado Tequila
0.75 oz. Lime Juice
0.75 oz. Grenadine
2 dashes Angostura Bitters
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for six to eight seconds. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice and garnish with a lime wheel.
Trivia:
After all my bitching about the name of this drink, it turns out Mexican Firing Squad isn’t even the real name of the drink. Granted, this is how it’s universally known, and this is how even Baker introduces it in his book, but it’s not the name. This is taken from the book’s index:
The cocktail is called a “Firing Squad.” He just happened to encounter it in Mexico. If only. What a missed opportunity.