a style · SCSouth Carolina mustard barbecue

Pork — whole hogs at some pits, hams or shoulders at others — cooked over hardwood coals or on cookers, chopped or pulled, and dressed with a yellow sauce of prepared mustard, vinegar, sugar and spices. Hash, a stew of pork and onions that in the Midlands often takes mustard too, comes over white rice beside it, and the meal is often a buffet. The style belongs to the Midlands, the counties around Columbia: a belt the geographers Charles Kovacik and John Winberry drew in 1987 from Newberry and Lexington counties down through Orangeburg toward Charleston, the German-settled country whose fork of the Saluda and Broad rivers is called the Dutch Fork.

German Protestants took up land between the Saluda and Broad rivers from the 1730s, in what became Lexington, Newberry and Richland counties — the Dutch Fork, 'Dutch' from deutsch — and at Orangeburg, where a colony of Swiss, German and Dutch families settled in 1735. The state's accounts lay the mustard sauce at their door: the tourism office says they 'brought their love of mustard', and the South Carolina Barbeque Association's history names the families who sell it — Bessinger, Shealy, Hite, Sweatman, Dukes. Tradition holds — the sauce was on farm tables long before any bottle; the earliest name attached to it is Joe Bessinger, who served it with pit-cooked pork at Holly Hill from 1939, and some accounts credit him with inventing it.

His sons carried it out of Orangeburg County. Maurice opened Maurice's Piggie Park at West Columbia in 1953 with his brother Joe Jr.; Thomas opened Bessinger's in Charleston, and Melvin opened Melvin's in Mount Pleasant in 1982; the Dukes family opened buffet restaurants from the 1950s — the two families, Charleston Magazine says, brought Midlands barbecue to the Lowcountry after the war. Maurice bottled the sauce as Carolina Gold, sold it in supermarkets nationwide in the 1990s, and by 1999 ran the largest barbecue business in the country.

The name also carries a civil-rights case. In 1964 Anne Newman, the wife of a Black minister, was refused entry to a Piggie Park drive-in and sued under the Civil Rights Act; Bessinger argued that his religion forbade serving Black customers. The Fourth Circuit ordered the restaurants opened to all, and in 1968 the Supreme Court, in Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, held that a plaintiff who wins such an injunction ordinarily recovers attorney's fees. On July 1, 2000, the day the Confederate flag came down from the State House, he raised it over his restaurants and handed out tracts arguing that slavery was not inherently evil; grocery chains dropped Carolina Gold, his $50 million suit against them failed at the state Supreme Court in 2007, and his children took down the last flag in 2013. He died in 2014.

At Sweatman's, whole hogs cook twelve to fourteen hours over oak and hickory coals and are basted with the mustard sauce as they go; at Maurice's, hams cook sixteen hours over hickory and the chopped meat is coated with the sauce for the plate; at Hite's, whole hogs and hams go over oak and hickory coals rendered from a wood fire. The sauce is prepared yellow mustard, vinegar, sugar or brown sugar and pepper — Bessinger's supermarket bottle listed soy sauce too. It goes on at the block, stands on the buffet line, and in the Midlands goes into the hash pot; some Orangeburg places blend it with ketchup into a 'rust' sauce.

Mustard sauce has spread from the Midlands to menus across the state this century. Maurice's is open in West Columbia — its offices, pits and side factory burned on October 26, 2024; the restaurant and its sign survived — with Bessinger's in Charleston, Sweatman's at Holly Hill and Hite's in West Columbia on Fridays and Saturdays, Shealy's at Batesburg-Leesville, and Dukes restaurants around Orangeburg.