a style · SCLight tomato barbecue

Pork — whole hog in the Pee Dee, shoulders and hams in the upper Midlands — cooked over coals or on cookers and served with a thin sauce that is the Carolinas' vinegar-and-pepper with ketchup stirred in. On South Carolina's four-sauce map, as the state tourism office and the South Carolina Barbeque Association publish it, it holds the Pee Dee and the upper middle of the state along the North Carolina line. Hash comes with it, of beef as often as pork toward the Upstate. It is the South Carolina twin of Lexington's dip, and the Barbeque Association's history maps the North Carolina Piedmont and the South Carolina Pee Dee as one light-tomato country.

The light-tomato sauce is the youngest of the vinegar family. The South Carolina Barbeque Association dates it to about 1900, 'vinegar and pepper with tomato ketchup added', and Wikipedia's account has it born of cheap mass-produced ketchup in the early twentieth century and of North Carolina's influence on the Upstate. The general history of barbecue sauce runs the same way: sugar, ketchup and Worcestershire came into sauces in the 1920s, and everything after the war got sweeter. Inference — the Lexington dip and the light-tomato sauce are the same invention made twice, or once and carried; the SCBA's own history treats the North Carolina Piedmont and the South Carolina Pee Dee as one light-tomato country, and the Piedmont's dip is the sauce Wikipedia describes as 'similar to the East Carolina sauce with the addition of tomato paste, tomato sauce, or ketchup'.

Where exactly it lives is argued. Kovacik and Winberry's 1987 geography set the four regions; the tourism office gives light tomato the Pee Dee and the 'upper middle part' of the state; Wikipedia gives it the Upstate; Robert Moss says the state has only two sauces, sweet mustard and spicy vinegar, and the tomato sauces are variations. Union County, in the upper middle, once had nearly fifty hash houses; Midway BBQ at Buffalo, opened around 1941 by Jack O'Dell, is the one left, cooking shoulders and hams over hickory, and its hash is beef, butter, onion, salt and pepper stewed down in a pot — 'Without hash,' its manager Jay Allen told the Southern Foodways Alliance in 2012, 'we're done. We're closed.'

Vinegar, salt, black and red pepper, and ketchup enough to color it, thinned with water; cayenne or a bottled hot sauce for heat; a little sugar in some houses. It is warmed, not cooked down. It goes on chopped or pulled pork at the block and stands on the table; on a Pee Dee buffet it sits beside the vinegar-and-pepper bottle, and in the upper Midlands it comes with beef hash and rice.

Midway BBQ at Buffalo, Union County, sells chopped pork in its house 'Original Sauce', pulled pork with none, and its beef hash; the tourism office still draws the light-tomato band across the Pee Dee and the upper Midlands, and mustard has spread into these counties from the middle of the state.