a wordPiedmont

The plateau between the coastal plain and the Blue Ridge, from New York to Alabama and nearly 300 miles wide in North Carolina; its eastern edge is the fall line, where rivers drop off hard rock onto the soft plain and towns grew at the head of navigation. In North Carolina barbecue, Piedmont style is Lexington style — pork shoulder, a red vinegar-and-ketchup dip, red slaw — and 'Western' means the same. In South Carolina the Piedmont is the Upstate, Greenville, Spartanburg and Anderson, where the sauce is a thin ketchup and vinegar and the hash is pork and beef.

Piemonte is the foot of the Alps, named in Latin documents by 1200; English took it through French and in 1755 applied piemont to the country at the foot of the Appalachians, adding the d by 1855. The fall line is where the name earns itself: the Piedmont's rivers leave the hard rock in a line of rapids, and the Congaree forms at Columbia on it. Wikipedia calls Lexington style 'Piedmont- or Western-style', most common in the Piedmont and west, pork shoulder only, with a red dip and red slaw; the South Carolina Encyclopedia has shoulders, hams and Boston butts in the Piedmont against the whole hog of the coastal plain. Lexington, 20 miles south of Winston-Salem in the Piedmont Triad, calls itself the Barbecue Capital of the World, and in 2007 the legislature made its festival the Official Food Festival of the Piedmont Triad Region. South Carolina's Upstate takes a light tomato sauce that Wikipedia attributes to North Carolina's influence, and its hash is beef and pork with onions. Inference — the Piedmont cooks the shoulder because a shoulder is what a town butcher sells; the whole hog stayed with the farm.