1. After @MurielBowser said Mumbo Sauce isn’t “quintessential DC,” she got a lot of pushback. "Where did it come from? No one really knows,” says Fox. fox5dc.com/news/local-new…
@MurielBowser 2. Yeah, actually, we do know. It’s even been litigated. Mumbo Sauce is the creation of Argia B. Collins. Born in Mississippi, he moved to Chicago when he was 14, and by 1950 had opened a BBQ restaurant. 
3. In what may have been a little salesmanship-style exaggeration, he said Mumbo Sauce was a “made of a secret recipe held in the Collins family for generations” that was formerly “one of the secrets of the Florida Everglades” dating back 400 years.
4. He started bottling and settling it, but couldn’t get it into grocery stores. In 1966, a young SCLC organizer brought Operation Breadbasket to Chicago. It was Jesse Jackson who got the black-owned label onto retail shelves.
5. That’s roughly when it made the jump to DC, becoming a beloved local condiment. So the mayor’s not wrong that this is a relatively recent development. But I’m less sure what makes something “quintessential."
6. A recipe born in the Everglades, brought to Mississippi, bottled in Chicago, bound-up in the civil-rights struggle, and then relocating to DC when it was about 18 years old, claiming the capital as its adoptive home? That’s as Washington a story as I’ve ever heard.
