a sauceScott's Barbecue Sauce

A bottled eastern North Carolina sauce — vinegar-based, the recipe kept secret, sold as sugar-free and fat-free — made by the Scott family of Goldsboro since the mid-1940s from a recipe the Rev. Adam Scott, a Black Holiness minister who began selling barbecue there in 1917, said came to him in a dream. His son A. Martel Scott Sr. patented it in 1946. The North Carolina Arts Council's trail page calls it 'believed to be the oldest commercially available barbecue sauce in the country'. It is sold in Harris Teeter and Food Lion and from the family's website, and the label offers it for meats, seafood, poultry and vegetables.

Adam Scott was born in Goldsboro in 1890, the grandson of Charles and Mary Scott, who had been enslaved in Johnston County, and the son of Joseph Scott, born in Oberlin, Ohio. He cooked at an Atlantic City hotel in 1911, married Bessie Bright that September, and by 1917 was in the barbecue business at home — cooking whole pigs in his back yard and, as the Arts Council's page puts it, selling chopped 'cue with his vinegar sauce through the back door to white men who knocked. He catered for the Algonquin Club, a whites-only social club. Between 1931 and 1933 the family home on Brazil Street became a restaurant: two hogs a week at first, then four to seven a day. David Cecelski's account has him catering a barbecue for President Franklin Roosevelt in the White House Rose Garden in 1933. He was a minister of the United Holy Church of America and by 1938 pastored three churches.

The sauce came, he said, in a dream, and took three years to work out — sugar-free and fat-free because, his grandson A. Martel Scott Jr. recalled, 'Daddy never believed in putting sweet stuff on meat'. It dressed the restaurant's barbecue for nearly thirty years before A. Martel Scott Sr., who had joined the business in the 1930s, adjusted it and took out a patent in 1946; the Arts Council's page dates the bottling to 1945. The restaurant moved from the house to its own building in 1951. Adam Scott died in 1983 at 93. In June 2001 the restaurant cut back to two lunch days a week and later closed; the sauce, run by A. Martel Scott III, sells about 750,000 bottles a year by the Arts Council's count.

It is used as the eastern sauce is used: poured over chopped pork at the block or the table, as a mop on a cooking hog, and — the label's own list — on meats, seafood, poultry and vegetables. It has no sugar to burn, so it can go on early. It is a family recipe, not published; what is known is what it leaves out.

Made and shipped from Goldsboro; on the shelves of Harris Teeter and Food Lion and sold from the family's website. The restaurant on the Arts Council's trail is closed.