Mumbo sauce — or “mambo sauce,” depending on your trademark preference — has a complicated history that countless publications have painstakingly tried to trace. Some claim the condiment was born at a rib joint on the South Side of Chicago. Others say carryouts in Washington, D.C., created it, a sort of spicy riff on sweet-and-sour sauce. One historian even suggested that “mild sauce,” a Chicago variant of mumbo, may have its roots in Southern barbecue before the Great Migration.
Whatever story you subscribe to, you couldn’t help but feel the weight of the moment when McDonald’s announced it would roll out its own mambo sauce nationwide, far beyond the two historically Black communities that fiercely stake their claim to the delectable stuff.