a saucevinegar-and-pepper sauce

Vinegar — cider or white — with salt, black pepper and crushed red pepper, and nothing else in its plainest form; some houses add sugar, a bottled hot sauce or lemon. It is thin enough to pour, tart, and as hot as the cook likes. It is the sauce of whole-hog barbecue on the Coastal Plain of both Carolinas, from Rocky Mount to the Pee Dee and the coast: used as a mop while the hog cooks, tossed through the chopped meat at the block, and set on the table for more. Wikipedia's history of barbecue sauce calls it the earliest American barbecue sauce and the root of most of the others.

Early home barbecue sauces were vinegar, salt and pepper, and stayed so until sugar, ketchup and Worcestershire came in during the 1920s. The sauce of the eastern Carolinas, Wikipedia says, was popularised by enslaved African cooks who also shaped American barbecue itself; the South Carolina tourism office calls vinegar-and-pepper 'the oldest sauce, perhaps the oldest in the nation'; the South Carolina Barbeque Association gives it the coastal plains of both Carolinas and a share in Virginia and Georgia. Tradition holds — vinegar was the English kitchen's preservative and its seasoning, and the sauce is what that kitchen did to a pig.

Its recipes are short. Ed Mitchell of Wilson uses apple cider vinegar, crushed red pepper, salt, sugar and black pepper. Skylight Inn dresses its chop with vinegar, salt, pepper and Texas Pete. Russell Cooper at Cooper's Country Store calls his 'downright vinegar and salt and pepper', with black, crushed and ground red pepper in it. Adam Scott of Goldsboro sold his from 1917, and his son patented it in 1946 as a sugar-free, fat-free bottle — 'Daddy never believed in putting sweet stuff on meat'. Rodney Scott's Charleston restaurant serves whole hog with a 'spicy vinegar sauce'. What none of them contains is tomato, and that absence is the whole of the east's argument with Lexington: Dennis Rogers of the Raleigh News & Observer said of the sauce, 'It doesn't need anything else'.

Stir salt into vinegar until it dissolves, add black pepper and crushed red pepper, and let it sit; heat is optional. On a whole hog it is mopped on in the last hours or not at all — many pits season only at the block — and the chopped meat, skin and all, is tossed with it and salt until it tastes right. On the tray it sits in a squeeze bottle or a shaker beside the Texas Pete. It soaks into chopped meat and cuts the fat; it is not a glaze and does not thicken.

Every eastern pit has its own. Bottled versions include Scott's of Goldsboro, sold in Harris Teeter and Food Lion, and Texas Pete's own Eastern Carolina BBQ Sauce, which lists apple cider vinegar, tomato paste, red pepper flakes and sugar — a tomato paste the tradition's own recipes leave out.