a sauceTexas Pete

A cayenne-pepper hot sauce made by the T.W. Garner Food Company of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, since 1929 — mild as hot sauces go, 747 on the Scoville scale — in a flip-top bottle with a red cowboy on a white-and-yellow label. It is not a barbecue sauce and is on this list because of where it stands: on the table at eastern North Carolina barbecue houses beside the vinegar, and, at Skylight Inn in Ayden, in the dressing itself, where the chopped hog is seasoned with vinegar, salt, pepper and Texas Pete.

Sam Garner ran the Dixie Pig, a barbecue stand in Winston-Salem, with his sons Thad, Ralph and Harold. Customers asked for a spicier sauce, and the family made one from cayenne peppers and put it out in 1929. A marketing adviser proposed 'Mexican Joe', to suggest Mexico's spicy cooking; Sam Garner wanted an American name, so Texas — a state known for hot food — was joined to Pete, Harold's nickname. Thad W. Garner founded the T.W. Garner Food Company the same year, and the company still makes the sauce in Winston-Salem, twenty miles north of Lexington, in dip country. Inference — a Piedmont barbecue stand's table sauce became the east's hot sauce because it was the one made in the state and stocked everywhere in it; the bottle joined the vinegar on Coastal Plain tables at some point this project has no date for, and Skylight Inn, cooking whole hogs since 1947, names it in its own seasoning. The company has since made an Eastern Carolina BBQ Sauce of its own — apple cider vinegar, tomato paste, red pepper flakes and sugar — along with a sriracha, 'Cha!', in 2013 and a Mexican-style sauce, Sabor!, in 2016; it dropped its hot-dog chili sauce in 2015.

Shaken over chopped pork at the table for the heat the vinegar sauce lacks; stirred into the house dressing at some pits — Skylight Inn's is vinegar, salt, pepper and Texas Pete; and, Tradition holds — the pepper of choice in home versions of the eastern sauce, a few dashes into a cup of vinegar.

The seventh-best-selling hot sauce in the United States in 2022 by Instacart's count, in 6-, 12- and 24-ounce bottles, with a Hotter Hot Sauce, a garlic sauce, a sriracha and the Eastern Carolina BBQ Sauce beside it. Still made in Winston-Salem.