Sauces wishing to present a bit of character usually tell a story about a ‘secret’ recipe, often belonging to an enigmatic-sounding gentleman (or lady) from the Deep South. Bottles are ornately embossed and adorned by labels suggesting they were batch-stamped by hand on an old printing machine. I found myself wanting to know more about Mr Stubb, Garland Jack or the brazen self-publicist Famous Dave.
Dave’s range ain’t pretty but it sure is a lot of fun, giving us flavours described as ‘zesty’, ‘sassy’ and even ‘devil’s spit’. Served up in a pig-embossed bottle with garish, unappetising label colours and an extra cartoon pig for good measure, I’m just not sure if Dave is famous for the right reasons. In a supermarket down the road, I encountered a whisky flask bottle with an opening line in place of a brand name: ‘Rufus Teague made some sauce’. Impossible not to read the rest of that label.