Ask for barbecue in most of America and you will be handed pork or beef. Ask in Owensboro, on the Ohio River in western Kentucky, and the answer is usually mutton, served with a thin, dark sauce the locals simply call “dip.” This piece draws on the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Kentucky BBQ collection, introduced by Western Kentucky University professor Wes Berry, on WKU Public Radio’s Owensboro reporting, and on Gabe Bullard’s history essay in The Bitter Southerner. Where those sources disagree, or admit they do not know, the article says so.
What Mutton Is, and Where It Is Cooked
Mutton is the meat of a sheep more than a year old; younger animals are usually sold as lamb, according to Bullard. WKU Public Radio adds that mutton was widely eaten in the United States but fell out of favor after World War II, as beef and pork took over.
Berry’s Southern Foodways Alliance introduction describes mutton as Kentucky’s most distinctive barbecue claim, while noting that only 18 of the 160 barbecue places he visited between 2009 and 2012 served it. He pictures a “mutton tree” concentrated in western Kentucky, with Christian and Hopkins counties as the trunk and Union, Henderson and Daviess counties as the upper branches. Owensboro, he says, is the center of it, with four restaurants serving mutton, including the Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn.
The Dip
Berry writes that mutton is usually basted while it cooks over hickory coals and served with a thin black dip: Worcestershire-based, with vinegar and spices such as black pepper and allspice. Moonlite’s Pat Bosley, speaking to WKU Public Radio, says that what Owensboro calls barbecue sauce is dip. That report describes it as an acidic, vinegar-based sauce with salt, pepper and whatever other spices a cook prefers. The two descriptions differ in emphasis, which fits Berry’s broader point that sauces vary county by county: Union and Henderson counties favor the Worcestershire dip, while in Christian County to the east the sauces turn to vinegar and cayenne.
The word travels beyond mutton, too. In the south-central “Monroe County style,” Berry says, sliced pork shoulder is sopped with a different “dip” of vinegar, butter, lard, cayenne and black pepper. “Dip,” in other words, names a family of thin, seasoned mops rather than one recipe.
Chipped Mutton and Burgoo
Two side traditions round out the picture. In Union and Henderson counties, Berry reports, “chipped” mutton is made from the outer bark of mutton quarters and pork shoulders, chopped and mixed with a thin tangy sauce that returns moisture to the fire-dried meat. Burgoo, a stew of many meats (especially mutton) and vegetables, is found mainly in a triangle running from Owensboro, which Berry calls the burgoo capital, down to Madisonville, Hopkinsville and Guthrie.
Church Picnics Keep the Tradition Going
Community cooking is central to how mutton survived. In a Southern Foodways Alliance oral history, Jerry Thompson of Union County recalls the annual August barbecue at St. Ann’s Catholic Church near Morganfield; it faded for a time, he says, and was revived in the 1980s by local farmers, who now cook thousands of pounds of mutton in an outdoor pit through the night. Bosley told WKU Public Radio that Catholic church picnics played a big part in keeping mutton going in the area. Owensboro’s International Bar-B-Q Festival, which began in 1979 with a competition for church cooking teams, is now called BBQ and Barrels.
Where Did It Come From? A Contested Question
No source here claims a proven origin. Bullard relays Bosley’s opinion that geography and culture together explain it: mostly Welsh, mostly Catholic settlers arrived in western Kentucky in the late 1700s and early 1800s and raised sheep for wool, and old sheep needed slow cooking. Owensboro’s visitor bureau director Dave Kirk offers a similar account to WKU Public Radio, pointing to sheep crossings on the Ohio River. Bullard also notes that when Calvin Trillin visited for The New Yorker in 1977, a local put it down to the area’s large Catholic population.
Bullard checks one part of the sheep story and finds it plausible: after Merino sheep reached the United States in the early 1800s and wool prices rose, shepherds moved west, and by 1840 Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia (including what is now West Virginia) held most of the South’s sheep. But when Bullard asked Berry about origins, Berry said he had put the question to mutton restaurants in Owensboro and Fancy Farm: “They all have hunches, but nobody seems to really have true evidence” of how it reached western Kentucky. Bullard also chased a theory that Jewish dietary practice influenced the tradition and reports finding nothing to confirm it; Bosley had never heard anything to support it, though nothing definitively ruled it out either.
A Government Push for Mutton
Bullard also records that in 1912 Agriculture Secretary James Wilson urged Americans to get used to eating mutton, and that the Owensboro Messenger mocked the suggestion, comparing it to Marie Antoinette telling peasants to eat cake. A 1913 Evansville Press column made a similar plea. The campaign did not lift mutton nationally, but Bullard notes that local papers of the period ran church picnic notices that often promised barbecue.
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