Eastern North Carolina Vinegar Sauce

The vinegar sauce of Eastern North Carolina — white vinegar, salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes — is the oldest barbecue sauce in America and the most minimalist. It is not a sauce in the sense that Kansas City sauce is a sauce (thick, sweet, tomato-based, meant to coat). It is a seasoning — thin as water, sharp as a blade, designed to cut through the richness of smoked pork fat and amplify the meat's own flavour. The sauce exists because whole hog barbecue is so rich that it needs acid to balance. The vinegar provides that acid. Everything else in the bottle is pepper and salt. The tradition is at least 200 years old and has not changed because it does not need to change.

A thin, clear-to-pale-red liquid: white or cider vinegar as the base (90%+), salt, coarsely ground black pepper, and red pepper flakes (or cayenne). Some versions add a small amount of sugar (a teaspoon per cup of vinegar — barely detectable, just enough to soften the vinegar's sharpness). The sauce should sting the tongue with acid, warm the throat with pepper, and then disappear, leaving the pork's smoke and fat to do the talking. It is applied by the ladle to chopped or pulled pork, or splashed from a bottle at the table.

On chopped or pulled pork. On the pork sandwich. Splashed on coleslaw. On collard greens. The sauce's role is acid — it goes wherever fat needs cutting.