What it means
A prickly pear margarita is a margarita, tequila and lime, with one Arizona addition: a syrup made from the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, which turns the drink a color somewhere between rosé and magenta. It is the state’s unofficial cocktail, the one visitors order on the first night because it matches the landscape, and the one locals order with a question attached: is the pink real? It is on nearly every menu in Scottsdale, at prices that do not vary much between the honest version and the other kind.
The fruit is the magenta-purple knob that sits along the top edge of the flat-padded cactus in every wash and median around the city from late summer. Spanish speakers call it a tuna; the prickly pear entry covers the plant and the desert plants field guide explains why you should not touch it barehanded. This page is about what happens to it in a glass.
Where you’ll meet it
On every cocktail list in town, on the Carlsbad Tavern menu, where the staff recommend it as insurance against the habanero dishes, at the happy hour windows of the Old Town tequila bars, and in the prickly pear lemonades, jellies and candies sold at every Arizona gift shop, including the cake on Main Street.
Where the word came from
The fruit came first, by a few thousand years. Engelmann prickly pear, Opuntia engelmannii, grows across Arizona, and its purple fruit, ripening in summer, was a reliable seasonal food for the Tohono O’odham, who sorted the fruits by color, ripening time and how well they stored. The color is a pigment family called betalains, the same compounds that make beets red, which is why real prickly pear juice stains hands, cutting boards and tablecloths and why a true syrup needs no help from a dye.
Nobody has claimed the first margarita made with it, and we are not going to invent one. What can be dated is the syrup industry that made the drink easy. Cheri Romanoski, a Tucson elementary teacher who taught children about the Sonoran Desert, turned a hobby of preserving fruit from her own property into Cheri’s Desert Harvest in 1985. The company still harvests the fruit, presses the juice for syrup and preserves, presses the seeds for oil and sends the skins and pulp to animal feed and compost, and its bottle of magenta syrup is the one behind many Arizona bars. Cheri’s own recipe is the standard: gold tequila, triple sec, fresh lime and lemon, and two ounces of prickly pear syrup, salt on the rim, shaken or blended.
From there the drink spread the way signature cocktails do, through resort bars that wanted something regional on the list and through the contemporary Southwestern kitchens of the 1980s and 1990s that put chiles, mesquite and cactus on white tablecloths. By the time Old Town became a tequila-list town, the drink was a fixture, and so was the shortcut: commercial flavorings and mixes, colored to a shade no cactus produces.
What it is not
It is not a strawberry margarita with a desert name, though a bad one tastes like it. It is also not a prickly pear cactus drink in the sense of the pads: nopales are the green paddles, eaten as a vegetable, and have nothing to do with the syrup.
The fine print
How to tell the real thing. Color: fruit syrup gives a drink a deep rosé to magenta tone with some translucence; a flat, opaque, neon pink means dye. Taste: the fruit is mild and slightly earthy, with a sweetness people compare to watermelon or kiwi, and it should sit behind the tequila and lime rather than on top of them. Candy sweetness and a sour-mix tang are the tells. The question: ask whether the syrup is house-made or Cheri’s. Bartenders who use either are proud of it; the ones using a flavored mix tend to say “it’s prickly pear” and move on.
Making the syrup at home is a late-summer project and a mildly dangerous one. The fruit is covered in glochids, hair-fine barbed spines that come off in clusters, embed in skin and work out one at a time over several days; the field guide’s warning is not a joke. Harvest with tongs, singe or scrub the glochids off, then boil the fruit, mash it, strain the juice through cloth and reduce it with sugar. A pound of fruit makes roughly a cup of syrup, and it keeps for months refrigerated. Pick only on your own land; the Preserve and city parks are off limits for harvesting.
The season matters for drinking too. The fruit ripens from roughly August into early fall, so syrup pressed then and bottled tastes brightest through the winter high season, which is also patio season, which is also when you want one. By the following summer most bars are on last year’s bottle or on the mix. Order accordingly, and if the color looks like a highlighter, have a paloma instead.