Deluxe Mixed Seafood Cocktail

This is what you serve when you want the seafood cocktail to be the impressive main event. In Mexico, it’s a malt glass filled to the brim with shrimp, maybe scallops, always octopus, squid or sea snails, and, if the place is really good, a spoonful of ceviche and a couple of raw oysters. By the way, when oysters are added, the coctel typically goes by the name of vuelve a la vida, “return to life,” because of its purported ability to cure a hangover. In Mexican market you can buy all the cooked seafood you need to make this coctel. While most cooks rely on cooked seafood, some use raw shrimp (or half of them raw) and some favor raw scallops as part of the mix. If you’re feeling flush, the addition of 4 to 6 ounces of picked crab is really, really good. You may be wondering about Clamato juice in the list of ingredients. History tells us that the product was invented in the northern Baja city of Mexicali, near the U.S. border—again, as a hangover cure. It’s always been very popular in Mexico as an ingredient in beer-fueled micheladas, but I think it’s most valuable in a coctel campechano. You’ll likely find it in your local grocery store (it’s now an American product made by the Mott company); if not, it’s in every Mexican grocery I’ve visited. Bloody Mary mix could be substituted. The word campechano in Mexican Spanish, when not referring to a person from the state of Campeche, always refers to a mixture of things. A taco campechano has lots of different meats; a coctel campechano, lots of seafood. Legend has it that during the 19th century, pirates plied the waters off the Caribbean state of Campeche, stopped along the coast with barrels of rum, which the locals mixed with local spirits and other ingredients to create liquid kind of cocteles. And thus, everything with lots of ingredients became campechano.