![]() ![]() The machine was such a success that, according to Martinez, "it brought bars in Tex-Mex restaurants front and center. He and a friend, a chemist named John Hogan, tinkered with the recipe (hint: the secret is in the amount of sugar) and adapted a soft serve ice cream machine to make margarita slush, and word of mouth signaled a hit for his fledgling business. But the 7-Eleven Corporation wouldn't sell him a Slurpee machine. Then came inspiration for the beleaguered boss in the form of a Slurpee machine at a 7-Eleven, a machine invented in Dallas in 1960 to make carbonated beverages slushy enough to drink through a straw. With their blenders hard-pressed to produce a consistent mix for the drink they made from Mariano's father's recipe, his bartenders were in rebellion. His customers created a high demand for the newly popular frozen drink. ![]() In 1971, young Mariano Martinez started serving margaritas in his new restaurant, Mariano's Mexican Cuisine. Frozen margaritas, made with the help of blenders, became popular in the '50s. First made on the California-Mexican border, the margarita became associated with the service of Mexican food in the United States, though it eventually spread to Mexico and around the world. ![]() In the '70s, the margarita surpassed the martini as the most popular American cocktail and, in the '80s, 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 frozen 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 Frozen Margarita Machine," living at the Smithsonian? Here's a story about how some things come to the museum 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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