Looking For a Great Barbecue Sauce?: African Contributions to Southern Cuisine

South Carolina barbecue sauce, recipe below

A while back I saw an episode on Charleston South Carolina  http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Anthony_Bourdain/Episodes_Travel_Guides/Episode_South_Carolina on Anthony Bourdain’s foodways show No Reservations on the Travel Channel. This is a great show from my prospective as a food historian and guy who loves to travel. Bourdain is both a chef and excellent writer.  I was struck by the owner of a renowned barbecue joint and others that paid very little homage to African cooks and African plants that have shaped the local cuisine in and around Charleston. During the antebellum period both poor whites along with the planter class enjoyed the classic soul food dishes that enslaved African created. Africans taught themselves how to cook such dishes, prepared them for their masters, and, in Historian Eugene Genovese’s words, “contributed more to the diet of the poorer whites than the poorer whites ever had the chance to contribute to theirs.” As it related to barbecue, poor whites in antebellum South Carolina seldom had access to meat to barbecue “except they steal hogs which belong to the planters, or their negroes,” writes travel Frederick Law Olmsted who visited South Carolina in the 1850s. Former slave Louis Hughes had this to say about who makes the best barbecue in antebellum Virginia. “It was said that the slaves could barbecue meats best, and when the whites had barbecues slaves always did the cooking.” I suspect this was the case in South Carolina too. Here’s a great link that includes a South Carolina barbecue sauce recipe and much more below.

South Carolina barbecue sauce: http://www.foodiewithfamily.com/blog/2010/03/01/barbecue-style-pulled-pork-sliders-south-carolina-barbecue-sauce-and-kansas-city-sauce/