El Diablo Cocktail

History

The El Diablo started life as a mere "Diablo" in the "Tropical Specialties" section of Hyman Gale & Gerald F. Marco's 1940 book The How and When.

Diablo
½ ounce Lime Juice
1½ ounce Ronrico White Rum
½ ounce Creme de Cassis
Shake well with 3 ounces of ice and serve in 10 ounce glass ¼ full of shaved ice and the rest with large lump ice. Add Ginger Ale, round of lime, red and green cherry. Serve with coloured straws.

Hyman Gale & Gerald F. Marco, The How and When (2nd Edition), 1940

The first reference to this cocktail with tequila in place of rum is as a "Mexican El Diablo" in Victor Bergeron's 1946 Trader Vic's Book of Food and Drink, where crucially the book denotes this as being a Trader Vic original cocktail. By the time the drink reappears in his 1968 Trader Vic's Pacific Island Cookbook the name has been shortened to "El Diablo." The recipe throughout four of Vic's books, including his 1972 , remains consistent as follows:
"½ lime
1 ounce tequila
½ crème de cassis
Ginger Ale
Squeeze lime juice into a 10-ounce glass over ice cubes; add spent lime shell. Add tequila and crème de cassis. Stir. Fill glass with ginger ale. Serve with a straw."

Tellingly, both the above recipes call for a 10oz glass, which is the maximum size of a true Highball glass. Modern-day El Diablo recipes (including ours) call for larger, typically 12oz, Collins glasses.

Due to the "TV" denoting Trader Vic original cocktails in the books disappearing from the El Diablo in the 1972 edition, some have questioned whether this was originally a Trader Vic cocktail. It wasn't; he merely swapped rum for tequila and tweaked the name.

Some suggest that Victor Bergeron created the Mexican El Diablo for his Señor Pico Mexican-themed restaurant concept, but TraderVics.com says, "The Señor Pico restaurant concept was first established in San Francisco by "Trader" Vic Bergeron in 1964," some 20 years after the cocktail appeared in his first book.