{"id":1721,"date":"2021-11-20T11:28:03","date_gmt":"2021-11-20T19:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cuisinestupide.com\/?p=1721"},"modified":"2021-11-20T22:09:40","modified_gmt":"2021-11-21T06:09:40","slug":"tequila-truth-and-reconciliation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cuisinestupide.com\/?p=1721","title":{"rendered":"Tequila: truth and reconciliation"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lot of people, it seems, have been bitten by tequila<\/a>. And it’s rarely just a minor flesh wound.<\/p>\n

My own bad tequila experience is probably much like yours: I simply drank too much of it. A friend was ordering shots for the table, and being a prudent sort I thought that I should pace myself. Which worked great until last call, when I felt obligated to play catch-up.<\/p>\n

At some point before the band quit for the night, I deemed it advisable to pour salt onto the dance floor in an attempt to “boost my moves.”<\/p>\n

The ensuing repercussions would be familiar to you, too, and don’t require much elaboration; let’s just say even the aroma of tequila induced a gag reflex in me\u2014for more than 30 years.<\/p>\n

In the course of exploring the cocktail universe through these Sunday Specials<\/a>, though, I felt obligated to give tequila another chance. And I’m pleased to report that it went well. My beloved gin need not worry about my continued faithfulness, but I’ll at least entertain the idea of an mezcal-type cocktail now and then.<\/p>\n

Before we get to that, though, a question: Why is it that the catalyst for so many alcoholic misadventures is tequila and not, say, vodka or rum?<\/p>\n

In part, I think, it’s the mystique surrounding the spirit. Although fermented beverages made from the agave plant have been around for centuries, tequila was essentially unknown outside of Central Mexico until the late 19th century<\/a> and wasn’t widely available in the United States until Prohibition, when smugglers began supplying it to speakeasies.<\/p>\n

Tequila’s unique taste and powerful punch added to the allure, as did the myth of the worm in the bottle (added to certain brands of mezcal in the 1950s, purely as a marketing gimmick<\/a>) and the even bigger myth that tequila is a hallucinogen (which seems to have arisen in the 1960s when someone confused mezcal with mescaline<\/a>, an entirely different thing).<\/p>\n

By the 1980s, tequila had gone mainstream (thanks to Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville”<\/a>) while also becoming a mainstay of college campus culture through the rise of the entirely American practice of drinking straight shots<\/a> with salt and lime. (Aficionados in Mexico recommend that you sip straight tequila slowly<\/a>, especially if it’s a complex all-agave variety.) The body count from those shots-parties alone, coupled with the casualty list from the “it tastes like a Slurpee” Margarita crowd, is incalculable.<\/p>\n

So what do you do if, like me, the very thought of tequila makes you feel like dumping your chum? I took the advice of M. Carrie Allan in The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n