Keep opening those N.C. barbecue sauce jars

Carolina Treet Cooking Barbecue Sauce is a tasty brand that originated in 1953 in Wilmington, N.C., and has become a statewide favorite. 

The product was one of 68 “cool things made in North Carolina” that competed in the 2021 online competition sponsored by the N.C. Chamber of Commerce to find “the coolest.” 

(The winner was a big, heavy-duty West Star truck manufactured by Daimler Trucks North America at its plant in Cleveland, N.C.) 

Carolina Treet was created at Wilmington’s Patricia Ann grocery store by owners and managers Norman A. Merritt and Lenwood King Sr., as the “perfect sauce to baste their rotisserie chickens.”

 

Ashley Morris of the Wilmington Star-News tells us: “They’d slab it on to baste their birds every 30 minutes. The result was instant success as the chickens were perpetually sold out and customers were clamoring for the sauce.” 

Sunday was the biggest day. Customers would come to the store after church and buy a barbecued chicken for their Sunday main dish. One whole chicken was $1.39. 

In the 1960s, heirs of the Norman Merritt family got the small chain of grocery stores, and the Lenwood King family got the sauce, according to Morris. 

Today, Carolina Treet is bottled and sold through Legacy Family Foods of Louisburg, N.C., in Franklin County. 

Morris noted that Carolina Treet contains a mix of vinegar and spices, but no sugar, artificial sweeteners or tomato products, so it “doesn’t burn or blister onto meats. It marries with the juices of the meats to create something unique, rather than masking the flavor of the meats underneath.” 

“It’s definitely my favorite sauce on the commercial market,” said Larry Casey, owner and chef at the legendary Casey’s Buffet in Wilmington. “The other sauces just taste like a chemistry set to me.”

 Larry Casey

Carolina Treet has its own fan club, which was organized in 2008 by professional photographer Jamie Moncrief, a former resident of Wilmington who is now living in Jacksonville, N.C. 

“Maybe one day North Carolina will be known for three distinctive barbecue styles,” Moncrief told Morris. 

First, there’s Lexington-style North Carolina barbecue in the Piedmont, and there’s the vinegar-based, whole hog barbecue to the east, Morris wrote. 

Then, there’s Carolina Treet. “I consider it ‘beach barbecue,’” Moncrief said.

 

Another “cool products” contender in the N.C. chamber’s 2021 online contest was Texas Pete Hot Sauce, a product of TW Garner Food Company, founded in Winston-Salem in 1929. 

Thad W. Garner was 16 when he bought the Dixie Pig Barbecue Stand. It came with a handwritten recipe for barbecue sauce, which his mother, Jane Garner, began making in pots on her stove at home. 

“His father, Sam Garner, began traveling North Carolina’s backroads, touting the sauce and selling it to restaurants and grocery stores,” wrote journalist Lynn Seldon of Oak Island. “As the sauce’s popularity grew, Garner’s two younger brothers, Harold and Ralph, also pitched into the family business.”

 

“When it came to naming the ‘family’ hot sauce, the three brothers had agreed on ‘Mexican Joe,’ but Sam felt that it should have an American theme,” Seldon said. They went with Texas Pete. 

While you can put original Texas Pete Hot Sauce on lots of different foods, it’s technically not a barbecue sauce. 

The Garner Foods’ website is now showing the introduction of four “new” Texas Pete BBQ sauces – Carolina Mustard, Eastern Carolina, Sweet Flame and Traditional.

 

Texas Pete’s national distribution network will surely help spread the gospel of pork barbecue in 2022.