a saucemustard-based barbecue sauce

Prepared yellow mustard thinned with vinegar and sweetened with sugar or brown sugar, with black and red pepper and whatever else the house keeps to itself — Bessinger's bottled version listed mustard, brown sugar, soy sauce and vinegar. It is yellow to gold, pourable, sweet-sour with a mustard bite. It belongs to the Midlands of South Carolina, the belt of German-settled counties from Newberry and Lexington through Orangeburg toward Charleston, and is the sauce the state is known for elsewhere. It goes on chopped or pulled pork at the block, is basted on whole hogs at some pits, and goes into hash.

German settlers took land along the Broad, Saluda and Congaree from the 1730s — Orangeburg's colony of Swiss, German and Dutch families arrived in 1735 — and the mustard sauce is credited to them by the state tourism office, the South Carolina Barbeque Association and Wikipedia alike, on the evidence of the names on the bottles: Bessinger, Shealy, Hite, Sweatman, Dukes. Wikipedia adds a colonial belief that mustard kept off mosquitoes. Tradition holds — the sauce was a farm and church-supper sauce long before anyone bottled it; Joe Bessinger served it with pit-cooked pork at Holly Hill from 1939, and some accounts name him its inventor.

Maurice Bessinger made it a product. He and his brother Joe Jr. opened Maurice's Piggie Park at West Columbia in 1953; by 1968 there were four drive-ins and by 2002 nine restaurants, and the sauce went into supermarkets nationwide in the 1990s as Carolina Gold, until by 1999 his was the largest barbecue business in the country. The same restaurants had refused Black customers until Anne Newman's 1964 suit under the Civil Rights Act; Bessinger argued that his religion required segregation, lost in the Fourth Circuit, and lost again at the Supreme Court in 1968, where Newman v. Piggie Park set the rule that a winning civil-rights plaintiff ordinarily recovers attorney's fees. On July 1, 2000, the day the Confederate flag came down from the State House, he raised it over his restaurants and distributed tracts arguing that slavery was not inherently evil; Bi-Lo, Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Kroger, Piggly Wiggly, Publix, Sam's Club, Wal-Mart and Winn-Dixie dropped the sauce, his $50 million suit against them failed at the state Supreme Court in 2007, and his children took down the last flag in 2013. He died in 2014. The family sells the sauce today as Southern Gold.

Whisk yellow mustard with cider vinegar, brown sugar, salt, black and red pepper — and, in Bessinger's bottle, soy sauce — and simmer briefly; it keeps. At Sweatman's it is basted on whole hogs through a twelve-to-fourteen-hour cook over oak and hickory; at Maurice's the chopped ham is coated with it for the plate; at Hite's the base flavour is a stronger yellow mustard without the sweetness. In the Midlands it is stirred into hash; in Orangeburg it is mixed with ketchup into a 'rust' sauce.

Restaurants bottle it — Maurice's Southern Gold, Shealy's sold online — and the mustard sauce has become more popular across the state this century, by Wikipedia's account. Henry's Smokehouse in Greenville keeps a mustard-based spicy sauce beside its tomato one.