A gentleman from North Carolina some years ago prepared authentic pulled pork barbecue and vinegar sauce for his co-workers in Tampa, Fla.

To a man -- and woman -- they loved the pork. But without exception, they hated the sauce.

"Damn North Carolinians," muttered one man.

Then there was the episode some years ago of "The Frugal Gourmet." The now-deceased Jeff Smith applauded the barbecue he found in "Charlotte, South Carolina," (a mistake he repeated a couple of times before someone off-camera corrected him), but condemned the vinegar-based sauce accompanying it.

Tar Heels everywhere groaned as Smith glopped what appeared to be an entire bottle of ketchupy Heinz barbecue sauce on the pork.

Even within North Carolina, vinegar-based sauce gets only limited respect. There, it's called "eastern style," compared with "western style," which is tomato-based. Some eastern-style fans will tell you that "tomato-based" means "contains ketchup." And that is not intended as a compliment.

And don't even get us started on South Carolina-style barbecue sauce. There, it's mustard-based.

Uniquely Southern as moonshine, barbecue has become a badge of identity, your sauce preference saying as much about where you're from as your palette.

"The basis of barbecue is smoke from wood fire, and that seems almost elemental, that it's God-given," says Southern food historian John T. Edge. "It's the trademark sauce or lack of sauce that a pitmaster adds that becomes their stamp, their place, their tradition, their family. That lends itself to provincial arguments."

Proponents of the vinegar-based variety claim theirs is the way barbecue was intended, a 200-year-old original not all that different from what Thomas Jefferson ate. A little cider vinegar, some red pepper and a dash salt is all you need.

But you leave the Carolinas, and the sauces are almost invariably tomato-based. They get sweeter the farther west you go, places like Memphis and Texas adding molasses or brown sugar to give them a little twang.

Fans of the tomato-based style don't understand how someone could ruin a piece of meat with vinegar, believing a little ketchup makes the barbecue sweeter, prettier, taste better. Save the vinegar for cleaning, they say.

"Everybody has an opinion on what barbecue is supposed to taste like," says Ollie Gates, owner of Gates Barbecue, a tomato-based place in Kansas City, Mo. "It tastes like what you originally tried in the beginning when somebody told you that was barbecue, so you compare everything to that taste."