a style · SCHeavy tomato barbecue

Pork shoulders and butts, ribs and chicken cooked over hickory or on cookers and served with a thick, sweet, red sauce of tomato, brown sugar or molasses, vinegar and spices — the sauce the state tourism office says you are most likely to find on a grocery shelf, and the one most of the country means by barbecue sauce. The four-sauce map gives it the western and northwestern corner of South Carolina: Greenville, Spartanburg, Anderson, Greenwood, the Savannah River side. Hash here is often beef, or pork and beef with onions, over rice.

The heavy tomato sauce is the newcomer. The South Carolina Barbeque Association's history says it 'evolved only recently, that is, in the last sixty or so years', pushed by commercial brands, and the wider record agrees: Heinz bottled the first major-label barbecue sauce in 1940, General Foods' Open Pit followed, Kraft came in around 1960 and advertised its way to first place, and after the war the sugar and the ingredient count of sauces climbed. The typical commercial sauce is Kansas City's, 'thick, reddish-brown, tomato-based, and made with sugar, vinegar, and spices', and Wikipedia's South Carolina article says the heavy tomato sauce of the west is 'more similar to sauces popular in other states'. Inference — a sauce that arrived by bottle would settle where the older sauces were thinnest on the ground, at the state's western edge, farthest from the whole-hog coast and the German Midlands.

Henry's Smokehouse in Greenville cooks pork butts twelve hours and ribs more than eight over hickory logs in open pits and puts two sauces out, a tomato-based mild and a mustard-based spicy. Greenwood's Festival of Discovery, each July, hosts a Kansas City Barbeque Society-sanctioned Carolina barbecue and Black Kettle hash competition and the South Carolina state championship cook-off, with a Blues Cruise through the uptown venues.

Simmer tomato — ketchup, paste or sauce — with brown sugar or molasses, vinegar, salt, black pepper and spices until it thickens. It is a finishing and table sauce: brushed on ribs and chicken near the end of cooking or served alongside, spooned over chopped pork on the plate, where it sits on the meat rather than soaking in. Hash in the Upstate is beef, or pork and beef, cooked with onions and served over rice.

Henry's Smokehouse runs rooms in Greenville and Simpsonville and a food truck; the Festival of Discovery brings its cook teams to Greenwood each July (July 8–10 in 2027). National bottles of the same kind share the western shelves with the state's mustard and vinegar sauces.