Barbecue and Apple Cider Vinegar
Courtesy of Florida Memory Project
October is national Apple month. Here is a related story. Martha McCulloch-Williams, author of Dishes and Beverages of the Old South, published in 1913, barbecue recipe calls for twelve hours of cooking time over hot coals from “midnight to noon next day, usually.” In the book, she shares her father’s sauce that he gleaned from an old plantation pit master. “Two pounds sweet lard, melted in a brass kettle, with one pound beaten, not ground, black pepper, a pint of small fiery red peppers stewed soft in water barely covered, a spoonful of herbs in powder—he would never tell what they were—and a quart and a pint of the strongest apple cider vinegar, with a little salt.” Combine the ingredients and simmer them for a half an hour while the meat is cooking. Then lightly apply the basting sauce to each side of the meat with a fresh clean mop preventing any from dropping on the coals and thereby causing smoke and ash from forming on the barbecued meat.
Mop Sauce Basting Recipe
Ingredients
for use on 10 lbs. of ribs)
1 bottle of ketchup (8 oz.)
2 cups vinegar
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 cup French mustard
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon pepper
Directions
Mix ingredients and baste with mop every 15 minutes. Meat cooked over hot coal fire should be done in 45 minutes. When meat is done use old fashioned sauce.
The Baltimore Afro-American, May 3, 1941