a style · ALAlabama white sauce wings

Wings smoked over hickory and then coated or dunked in white sauce — a mayonnaise-based barbecue sauce with vinegar, lemon juice, black pepper, salt, and in many versions cayenne and horseradish. It is thin, sharp and pale, and it goes on at the end of the cook rather than during it, because mayonnaise breaks over heat. The result is tangy rather than sweet, with none of the tomato or molasses a reader expects from the word barbecue.

Bob Gibson invented it in Decatur, Alabama in 1925, at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, and it was used on chicken. That is the fact every account agrees on: the sauce, the man, the town, the year, the bird.

The method is recorded as smoke first, then dunk. Alabama's barbecue is a chicken-and-hickory tradition as much as a pork one, and white sauce is the sauce that goes with the chicken.

It stayed a north Alabama thing for most of a century. The sauce was bottled and sold commercially from 1994, which is when it began appearing outside the region.

Tradition holds — the mayonnaise is there to keep white meat from drying over a long smoke, the fat standing in for basting. This project could not source that explanation to a document and marks it as the story the tradition tells rather than an established reason.

Inference — the wing is a later and smaller application of a whole-chicken sauce. Nothing in the sources searched here dates a first white-sauce wing or names the cook who made one.

Rub the wings with salt and pepper and smoke them over hickory until the skin renders and the meat is done through — some pits finish them hot, over direct heat or in oil, because a slow smoke leaves wing skin slack. Then dunk: a pan of white sauce, the wings in and straight out, so the coat is thin and even. Sauce at the end and off the heat, because mayonnaise splits. Serve with more of the same in a cup. The sauce keeps in the fridge and sharpens for a day or two.

Bottled white sauce sells nationally and turns up on wing boards a long way from Decatur, where it usually arrives as a dip rather than a coat. Inference — it reads to most American drinkers as a rival to ranch, which is not what it is: white sauce is a vinegar sauce built on mayonnaise and meant to go on hot meat, and ranch is a cold buttermilk-and-herb dressing meant for dipping.