To answer that question, we have to go back hundreds of years to the settlers of the original colonies. English, German, Spanish, and French immigrants brought with them their technique of seasoning the meat before adding a sauce. Even then, the meat was slow roasted over an equally low fire. The sauce was applied to keep the juices inside the meat.
In The Beginning The sauce evolved as each colony brought the ingredients. For example, German cooks’ base for any dish was mustard. The English used a vinegar base in their sauces due to their love for a tart taste. In Memphis, the taste was sweet due to their use of molasses. It’s About Meat Even then, the sauce depended upon the kind of meat being cooked. Pork began as and continues today to be the primary barbecue meat. In movies, it’s always a whole hog roasting on a spit above a low flame. People baste the meat with sauce at different periods. Thus, company name is the meat and the sauce is sweet and spicy.
However, Texas chimed in with cattle. Their land was ideally suited for raising beef cattle, having not seen many wild boar. On the other hand, beef requires different seasoning and a different barbecue sauce. Texans used a base of Memphis’ sweet tomato-based barbecue sauce to make their own kind of sauce. Today’s BBQ Today’s BBQ Belt mixes beef, chicken, turkey, and pork to form the most mouth-watering barbecue you’ll ever eat. The mixture of meats and the way they’re seasoned before barbecuing gives the dish a richness never seen before. No matter which type sauce base you prefer, the dish has drawn people to it and to the BBQ Belt for hundreds of years. There’s a delicious and very good reason people come from all over the world to eat smoked BBQ ribs from Saint Louis.
