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Sauce for Barbecues
Mix together one-half pound of fresh butter, one tablespoonful of mustard, half a teaspoonful of red pepper, the same of black pepper, salt to suit the taste, and very strong vinegar. When the meat has become heated through, begin to baste, and baste very often until the meat is sufficiently cooked. If the sauce does not seem to be very hot, add another pinch of red pepper.
CHAPTER XII.
This is a basting mop for open-fire barbecue, not a finishing sauce — it is butter, vinegar and heat, and it is applied throughout the cook rather than served alongside.
- The vinegar is unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity at all. Half a pound of butter to roughly a cup of vinegar gives a mop that stays loose and brushes on well; more vinegar makes it sharper and thinner.
- Half a pound of butterTwo sticks, 225 g. Melt it and hold the mop warm at the edge of the fire — if it cools the butter sets and the mixture separates into a greasy paste that will not brush.
- Red pepperCayenne. Half a teaspoon in half a pound of butter is mild by present standards; the instruction to add another pinch if it is not hot enough is the author admitting as much.
- MustardPeriod books use "mustard" for both the dry powder and the prepared condiment. Dry mustard is the safer reading here, since it dissolves into the hot butter; if you use prepared mustard the sauce will be milder and slightly thicker.
- When to startThe recipe says only to begin basting once 'the meat has become heated through'; in practice that means waiting until the exterior has set rather than mopping cold raw meat, where vinegar and butter mostly run off into the coals.
- Do not put the mop on the tableThe brush travels between raw meat surfaces and the pot all through the cook. Anything left over has been contaminated by drippings and should be discarded, or brought to a hard boil for several minutes before it is used as a sauce.
- Butter and fireMilk solids scorch. Keep the meat away from direct flame after basting begins, or the mop will blacken the exterior long before a large cut is done.
- QuantityHalf a pound of butter makes a substantial amount of mop; for a whole hog or a pit cook the mixture can simply be scaled up. Keep it warm while in use, but do not hold it indefinitely.
- A stray line"CHAPTER XII." at the end is a printing artifact carried over from the page break, not part of the recipe.
Vinegar, butter and pepper is among the oldest recognisable barbecue sauce formulas in American cookery, and appears well before tomato and molasses sauces. Recipes of this shape turn up in Southern household books through the nineteenth century, when barbecue was often associated with meat cooked slowly over a pit at a public gathering. The mop served as much as a working tool as a flavouring: the vinegar and fat helped keep a large cut from drying out over a long cook, and the pepper supplied most of the seasoning. Something of the same formula survives in eastern North Carolina, where whole-hog sauce is still largely vinegar and red pepper. That a general household compendium carries it with no explanation of the method suggests barbecue was familiar enough to need comment only on the seasoning.