Encyclopedia of Alabama (Alabama Humanities Alliance)
Big Bob Gibson BBQ
What this source is
- Authority
- Specialist publication
- Territories
- US
- Primacy
- secondary
- Commercial interest
- none
- Retrieved
- 2026-08-22
- State
- Read and citable
By Mark A. Johnson, published by the Encyclopedia of Alabama, an Alabama Humanities project. The white sauce is one of the few American regional sauces whose origin an institution will actually pin to a place and a date, and this one does: `Gibson crafted a white sauce of mayonnaise, vinegar, and black pepper to smother his smoked chickens`, at a restaurant established in Decatur in 1925. It also states the application, which matters more than the recipe — `Gibson split his chickens, seasoned them, roasted them over hickory wood smoke for three hours, and then dunked them in the concoction` — a sauce applied AFTER the cook, by immersion, which is a different mechanism from basting or glazing and is why the record can say anything about how the sauce behaves under heat at all.
What it may be cited for
Culture, History, Culinary practice
- Explicitly not safety: An encyclopedia entry about a restaurant is not a food-safety instrument. Its three-hour smoking figure is a description of one establishment's practice and is not an endpoint.
What we recorded from it
“Gibson crafted a white sauce of mayonnaise, vinegar, and black pepper to smother his smoked chickens. [...] Gibson split his chickens, seasoned them, roasted them over hickory wood smoke for three hours, and then dunked them in the concoction.”
The Encyclopedia of Alabama records a white sauce of mayonnaise, vinegar and black pepper created at a Decatur restaurant, applied by dunking the chickens after they had been smoked.
- AFTER the cook, by immersion. That is neither basting nor glazing, and it is the practical reason a mayonnaise-based sauce works at all — it never meets the fire.
- The three hours is a description of one establishment's practice in a historical account. It is not an endpoint and nothing in this catalogue treats it as one.
- Two sentences from the same article, joined with a bracketed ellipsis.
Claims resting on it
- A white barbecue sauce of mayonnaise, vinegar and black pepper is documented as originating at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur, Alabama, applied to chickens by dunking them after they had been smoked over hickory rather than during the cook.
If this source changes, these are the claims that need rechecking. That is the point of recording provenance per claim rather than per page.