I define barbecue sauce as a traditional American sauce, usually made with ketchup, that is used on grilled chicken, ribs, pork, etc. There are many other sauces in this book that can be applied to grilled items, but only this one is your genuine, down-home All-American Barbecue Sauce.

Being a barbecue purist, I believe that the sauce in itself has been totally overrated as it relates to the whole of a plate of barbecue. Barbecuing is a method of cooking, not a sauce. Whether you’re talking about brisket, sliced pork, spareribs, or chicken, the sauce is an accompaniment to the barbecued meat, a condiment rather than an essential ingredient. The sauce has been given prominence only as people pay less attention to the process. In North Carolina, for example, barbecued pork is served plain, either chopped or shredded, on a sandwich. The sauce—in the case of eastern North Carolina, white vinegar and red pepper flakes, in western North Carolina, a sweet-and-sour ketchup and Italian dressing mix—is served on the side to be put on the barbecue at the last minute. (For this reason, barbecue aficionados call it a “finishing sauce.”) In Kansas City, where the barbecue of choice is pork spareribs which are served dry, they serve a grainy, thin, ketchup-based sauce on the side. Likewise in Texas, where the sauce for the sliced barbecued brisket is applied to one’s liking just before, eating. In fact, since barbecue sauce usually has some sugar in it, if you apply it during the grilling process, the sugar in the sauce will burn.

What I’m saying is that when you hear people talking about how they have some extra special, supersecret barbecue sauce, I would be highly doubtful that I was going to be eating any type of real honest-to-God barbecue. In fact, I’ve seen a lot of real barbecue pros just doctor up some ketchup with sugar, vinegar, and spices, or even take store-bought sauce and change it a little.