Southerners love their barbecue

• By CAROL ANNE BLITZER
• Advocate Food writer
• Published: Jul 2, 2009

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The South has produced a population of “barbecue experts,” who argue over wet sauces versus dry rubs, grilling over smoking, direct heat or indirect heat and gas versus charcoal.

But one of the biggest areas of contention is barbecue sauce. Every cook has his favorite!

Man has “barbecued” since the beginning of time, but, amazingly, commercial barbecue sauces are a relatively new product.
“Barbecue of various kinds has always been basted with herbs and marinades, but ‘barbecue sauce’ as such is of rather recent vintage,” writes John F. Mariani in his “Dictionary of American Food and Drink.”

According to company information, the Louis Maull Co. in St. Louis produced the first commercial barbecue sauce in 1926. Through word of mouth, demand for the product spread beyond St. Louis.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Maull’s Barbecue Sauce reached a national audience in its television commercials, which urged consumers, “Don’t baste your barbecue, Maull it!”

Today, the company, which started in 1897 as a grocery business, devotes itself almost exclusively to its barbecue sauce.

Mariani notes that the first published reference to prepared barbecue sauce was by Betty Fussell in her 1984 book, “I Hear America Cooking: The Cooks, Regions and Recipes of American Regional Cuisine.”

Fussell described a “French brown sauce, spiked with ketchup, onions, mustard and Worcestershire sauce” from Louis De Gouy’s “Chef’s Cook Book,”  published in 1939.

Heinz barbecue sauce, originally produced in the 1950s, was the first nationally distributed sauce.

“We’re so proud of our new Heinz Sauces that we’ll pay you a quarter to try one,” the company advertised in 1959. Consumers were urged to send in a neckband from a bottle of the sauce to receive a quarter.

In 1960, Kraft introduced its barbecue sauce as a cooking oil with a bag of spices attached. It advertised its product with 19 herbs and spices as “the barbecue sauce that gives you the flavor you cook outdoors to get.”

The popularity of commercial barbecue sauces has increased exponentially over the years. Today, according to grilling expert and cookbook author Steven Raichlen, there are more than 700 commercial sauces produced in the United States including many that are regionally produced and distributed.

Most sauces are tomato-based with a variety of spices and other ingredients from the obvious brown sugar, honey, molasses, mustard and hot sauce to the unusual anchovies, ginger and soybean oil.