a wordCarolina Gold

Two South Carolina things with one name. The sauce: the yellow-mustard barbecue sauce of the Midlands — mustard, vinegar, sugar and spices — which Wikipedia says is sometimes called Carolina Gold and which Maurice Bessinger of Piggie Park sold in supermarkets under that brand. The rice: an heirloom variety of Oryza sativa named for the gold of its unhulled grain, grown in the Lowcountry by enslaved people from the 1780s, the staple of Lowcountry cooking, last harvested commercially in 1927 and revived from a seed bank in the 1980s.

The rice came first. Carolina Gold was popularized in South Carolina in the 1780s; at the outset of the Civil War 3.5 million of the 5 million bushels of rice grown in the United States were Carolina Gold, grown in the Lowcountry by enslaved people. The last commercial crop was harvested in 1927. In the 1980s Richard and Patricia Schulze, restoring rice ponds at Hardeeville, found a stock in a USDA seed bank in Texas, planted 14 pounds and harvested 64; by 1988 they had 10,000 pounds a year, and Anson Mills and Carolina Plantation Rice sold it to the public from 1998. The sauce's name is younger. Mustard sauce belongs to the German-settled Midlands. Maurice Bessinger, who opened Maurice's Piggie Park in West Columbia with his brother Joe in 1953, sold a sauce of mustard, brown sugar, soy sauce and vinegar under the Carolina Gold brand and by 1999 had the largest barbecue operation in the country; in 2000, when he raised Confederate flags over his restaurants, grocery chains dropped the sauce from their shelves. Inference — Carolina Gold for any yellow mustard sauce is the brand gone generic, wearing a name the rice made first.