Who Sugared the Ribs and Sweetened up the Barbecue Sauce

I don’t understand why barbecue got married to sugar.
Say “barbecue sauce” to anyone, and most likely they will imagine a red tomato liquid with spices and sweeteners. Why did barbecue sauce change so much from the original early American mix of vinegar and pepper to a more complex mix of tomatoes sauce, spices, sugar and other seasonings? Nowadays you’ll even find a lot of sugared sauce in the South where peppered vinegar ruled long before tomatoes were considered safe to eat.
More than 50 sweeteners are on the market today. The name makes little difference, except for the high fructose corn syrup we’ve all heard about. Flavors vary, but sweet is sweet, be it from cane, beet, corn, honey, fruit or maple sap.
Everybody knows that barbecue cooked to perfection needs no sugar or other seasonings. Wherever you look in the competition barbecue network today, however, as well as in barbecue restaurants, you see cooks on a sugar kick. they rub their meat with sugar, they inject their meat with sugar, they mop or spray their meat with sweetness as they cook it, and they put sugared sauce on their meat when they serve it. Sometimes they glaze it with sugar. How and why, I wonder, did this candy-splashed approach to cooking and serving barbecue get started.
My first taste of barbecue sauce was in Oklahoma City when I was a child. The sauce was on a barbecue beef sandwich. It was sugared and spiced and red. Red tomato catsup laced with spices, herbs, sugar and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Back then that was pretty much the usual sauce, and today even more so. Although I still like the sweet stuff of my childhood–in moderation–my taste for sauces has become broader over the years. Now I also like sauces that are light on sugar or sans sugar and heavy on the vinegar or mustard or both, especially when barbecue pork is on the plate. As for barbecue beef, it’s OK served with optional sweet sauce on the side, but I agree with Kreuz and Smitty’s in Lockhart, Texas: perfect barbecue meat needs no sauce, sweet or otherwise. Admittedly, they are no strangers to salt and pepper.
When we cook slow and low, rendering most of the fat out of meat, why do we undo the health benefits of the barbecue method of cooking by adding high-carb, empty calorie sweetness? It’s not the meat that makes us fat. It’s the sugar.

Ardie Davis is a barbecue legend, the founder of Greasehouse University where you can get your Ph. B., or doctorate in barbecue. He is the author of two books and has two more coming out in April, 25 Essentials: Techniques for Smoking and 25 Essentials: Techniques for Grilling, both to be published by The Harvard Common Press. He lives outside of Kansas City when he’s not on the road, tasting or cooking barbecue.