a worddip

The Lexington word for its sauce: vinegar, water, ketchup or tomato, salt, black and red pepper, sugar to taste — thin enough to pour, reddish rather than red. It goes on the chopped shoulder at the counter, sits on the table in a bottle, and is the dressing of the red slaw. Each pit's recipe is its own and, the town's own article says, closely guarded; the taste runs from tangy to slightly sweet or spicy. The eastern sauce is the same idea without the tomato, and is not called dip.

Dip is Old English dyppan, to plunge, kin to deep. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the noun for a liquid you dip something into to 1825, and records a nineteenth-century kitchen sense: the juices and fat left in the pan after cooking meat. NCpedia explains the Lexington name by service — the thin tomato sauce is served at the table, because sauce on meat over an open fire is a hazard, so the meat is dipped after cooking. Inference — the pan-juice sense fits as well: the first Piedmont dips were drippings, vinegar and pepper, and the Wikipedia article on barbecue sauce has the early homemade sauces as vinegar, salt and pepper, with ketchup and sugar arriving in the 1920s. The Wikipedia article on Lexington says the shoulder is basted in a sauce 'called dip locally' of vinegar, ketchup, water, salt and pepper; the North Carolina Barbecue Society's page has red slaw made with the barbecue sauce 'locally called dip' in place of mayonnaise. Tradition holds — the recipe line runs from the tent pits on the Lexington courthouse square in the 1910s to Warner Stamey and the pits his cooks opened.