Seven days a week, folks from all around make the pilgrimage to the port city of Decatur, Ala., to discover the wonders of a magical liquid concoction known simply as "Alabama white sauce."
Decatur, a city of about 55,000 people on the banks of the Tennessee River in North Alabama, is considered the birthplace of that famous barbecue sauce, and one of its favorite sons, a towering railroad man aptly named "Big" Bob Gibson, is the one who originated the recipe nearly a century ago.
So, among connoisseurs and curiosity-seekers alike, a visit to either of the two locations of Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur is like going to the promised land.
"Big Bob Gibson is a destination," says Chris Lilly, a world champion barbecue pitmaster who is married to a great-granddaughter of the legendary Gibson. "At any time, if you go out into the Big Bob Gibson parking lot, you see license plates from all over.
Chris Lilly is a world champion barbecue pitmaster who is married to a great-granddaughter of the legendary Big Bob Gibson. Art Meripol
"There are a lot of people that stop in Decatur, Ala., just to eat barbecue, and the one thing they want to try when they come in the door, they want to try this barbecue white sauce that they've heard about," Lilly adds. "It is definitely a lure to pull people in from all over the country to try this for the first time, where it was originally made."
Back in the 1920s, the 6-foot-4, 300-pound Gibson worked for L&N Railroad during the week, and on weekends, he treated family and friends to pork and chicken that he smoked in a pit he dug in his backyard and served on an oak table that he had nailed to a nearby sycamore tree.
He got so good at it, in fact, that he soon left the railroad to get into the barbecue business, opening the original Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in 1925.
Just how Robert Lee Gibson conceived his celebrated sauce remains pretty much a mystery, though.
"Now, how he came up with the recipe, I don't know," Don McLemore, a grandson of Gibson's who has worked in the family business since 1972, says. "None of my family knows. I wish I did."
Lilly, who is McLemore's son-in-law, has a good theory, though.
Gibson, Lilly says, was partial to sopping his whole pork shoulders with an eastern North Carolina-style sauce that he made with vinegar, cayenne pepper, lemon juice and salt.
But the whole chickens stayed on the pit for up to three hours, so he needed a sauce with a higher fat content to keep the birds from getting too dry, Lilly says.
That's when Gibson hit on a simple solution.
"He opted for mayonnaise," Lilly says. "From my understanding, that's how he came up with the white barbecue sauce the vinegar to give him his favorite barbecue flavor and the mayonnaise to keep his chickens from drying out.
"And thus was born the white barbecue sauce."
Going nationwide
For decades after that, the thin, peppery, vinegar-and-mayonnaise sauce was pretty much a regional North Alabama phenomenon.
(Art Meripol Photography/artmeripol.com)
But Gibson, who died in 1974, never tried to protect his recipe, and as the Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Que family tree began to branch out around the state, so, too, did the popularity of the white sauce, Lilly says.
"There have been so many people that have worked in the kitchen at Big Bob's over the years and have left to do their own thing – the white sauce recipe going with them," he says. "So, there are a lot of versions of barbecue white sauce."
About 90 miles south of Decatur in Birmingham, for instance, such barbecue institutions as Miss Myra's Pit Bar-B-Q in Cahaba Heights and Saw's BBQ in Homewood have slathered their grilled chickens in Alabama white sauce for years.
Meanwhile, farther from home, variations of Big Bob Gibson's original white sauce have appeared on menus from the East Coast to the West, including the Alabama White Wings at Blue Smoke in New York City and the smoked chicken with white sauce at Russell St. BBQ in Portland, Ore.
"You're seeing it all over, and it's not just in barbecue restaurants," Lilly says. "It's in fine-dining restaurants, as well. And it's always referred to as an Alabama white sauce."
Lilly is especially fond of the barbecue carrots with white sauce served at The Publican in Chicago. The chefs at The Publican use yogurt instead of mayonnaise in their recipe.
"I always try other people's white sauce just to see what they are doing different, to see how close they are to the original recipe or where their minds have taken it," Lilly says. "Most of the time it is a lot different than what we serve at Big Bob's."
An all-purpose sauce
In Decatur, between the Sixth Avenue SE location and the one on Danville Road SW, Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q goes through about 20 gallons of the white sauce a day, Lilly says.
He considers it to be a vinegar-based – not a mayonnaise-based – sauce.
"When you taste the white sauce, the first thing you're going to get is that acidic vinegar up front, but the mayonnaise sort of smooths that out," Lilly says. "The best way to describe our barbecue white sauce is a vinegary-peppery flavor. So, a lot of vinegar, a lot of black pepper."
Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q began bottling and selling the sauce in 1994, and it is available at the restaurants, online and in most major grocery stores in Alabama, southern Tennessee, eastern Mississippi, western Georgia and the panhandle of Florida.
"We ship online every day from bigbobgibson.com," Lilly says. "We ship a lot of barbecue sauce."
Every smoked chicken served at the restaurants is speared with a long-handled poultry fork when it comes off the pit and then ceremoniously baptized in a vat of the white sauce before it goes onto a customer's plate.
At the table, most of the guests douse their chickens with more of the tangy liquid.
"Absolutely," Lilly says. "One dunk is usually not enough for most customers. That's why we keep it on the table."
And just what is it about the white sauce that makes it the ideal accompaniment to smoked chicken?
"The only thing I can say is that it just makes that chicken so good," McLemore says. "Really, it does. And it's so different from the other barbecue sauces."
Customers, though, have tried the white sauce on just about everything on the menu.
"They'll put it on pork," Lilly says. "They'll put it on potatoes. They'll put it on salads. They'll dip their potato chips in it. It's great on turkey, as well. It's definitely an all-purpose condiment for a barbecue restaurant."
'A badge of honor'
Lilly, who started working at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in 1992, has led the restaurant's competitive barbecue team to five grand championships at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, the Super Bowl of barbecue.
As such, he has become a rock star in the barbecue world, appearing on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel and traveling the country as the official pitmaster for Kingsford Charcoal.
And wherever his travels take him, he's always on the lookout for the Alabama white sauce that Big Bob Gibson made famous.
"It makes me proud to know that it originated with my wife's great grandfather back in the 1920s," Lilly says. "So, it's almost like a badge of honor seeing it on somebody else's menu. It makes us happy."
