The Mexican Firing Squad is a tart, rose-red tequila drink with a memorably grim name and a heavy hand of bitters. It was collected — not invented — by the American travel writer Charles H. Baker Jr., who tasted it at a Mexico City bar in 1937 and carried the recipe home.
The good tequila cocktail did not begin with the Margarita.
Collected by a Roving Drinker
Charles H. Baker Jr. was less a bartender than a connoisseur of the world's bars. His 1939 book The Gentleman's Companion reads as a drinking travelogue, each recipe pinned to a place and an anecdote. The Mexican Firing Squad is filed to La Cucaracha Bar in Mexico City, where Baker noted it in 1937. The name is his era's gallows humour; the drink underneath is a genuinely good tequila sour.
The Spec
The structure is a sour with grenadine standing in as the sweetener — tequila, fresh lime, pomegranate — but the defining move is the bitters. Where most recipes treat Angostura as a single dash of seasoning, this one calls for several, and means it.
Real Grenadine Matters
Grenadine should be pomegranate syrup, not the fluorescent corn-syrup-and-dye bottling the name has come to mean. Real grenadine — pomegranate juice cooked down with sugar — brings a tart, faintly bitter fruit the cheap stuff cannot. It is worth making, and takes ten minutes.
Bitters in Quantity
Three dashes of Angostura is not a typo. The bitters are what keep the grenadine's sweetness in check and give the drink its dry, almost savoury backbone. Treat them as a structural ingredient here, not a garnish.
Bottom Line
The Mexican Firing Squad is proof that the good tequila cocktail did not begin with the Margarita. Tart, dry, and a striking deep pink, it deserves a far wider audience than its grim name has won it.