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Jack’s Mom’s BBQ Sauce
 
Leslie Borden, June 2003
This is Jack’s mother’s recipe and is the best barbecue sauce I’ve ever had, bar none, including some high-end “gourmet” products and some otherwise very good barbecue joints.  This not an untested assertion:  Rob went to Memphis once and had some of Corky’s barbecue shipped home.  With Jack and Irene, we conducted a scientific, side by side tasting of Corky’s, Red, Hot & Blue’s, Jack’s, and Pierce’s (Pierce’s is near Williamsburg; it used to be a down and dirty, grungy, don’t-dare-to-use-the-restroom kind of place, but it’s expanded, cleaned up, and gone upscale over the last 10 years) sauces.*  Anyway, here’s how to make “Jack’s Mom’s,” as it is known in our house.  Jack says he has no idea where his mom got the recipe, but he said she used it as a sauce for roast fresh ham.
• ¼ tsp. red pepper
• 1- ½ tsp. seasoned salt
• Lawry’s, which Rob sneers at, but Jack and I like.  I think 1- ½ tsp. is too much, though.
• 4 T. brown sugar
• ½ tsp. dry mustard
• 10 oz. ketchup
• I don’t know how they measure ketchup, but a ten-ounce bottle doesn’t equal a cup plus a couple of ounces when I measure it.
• 2 - 3 drops Tabasco sauce
• Did you hear about the couple who’d been married so long they were on their second bottle of Tabasco sauce?  I tried this line on a Southern friend, who said, “well, maybe in a Yankee household. . . . ”
• 1 T. soy sauce
• ½ c. vinegar
• Juice of one lemon
• 1/8 tsp. black pepper
Mix it all together in a saucepan, bring it to the boil, and cook 10 - 15 minutes.
By the way, here are the results:  Corky’s was too sweet for our taste; RH&B was nice and rich, but not as good as Jack’s; Pierce’s was thin and tart (probably because Pierce’s is a lot closer to North Carolina, where they do that vinegar-based barbecue sauce); and Jack’s came out on top.  We did note, by the way, that Jack’s, while not as tart as Pierce’s, is more tart than RH&B, perhaps because Jack (and his mom) are from Atlanta, again, closer to that North Carolina taste . . . .