Just the Essence of Meat, Nothing More, Nothing Less
October 8th, 2008
Sai Grog Issan
When a menu mentions meat in Thailand, it doesn’t always mean that you’ll get a hulking center of the plate protein as would be expected in the U.S., sometimes it just refers to a few small bits or bones, expertly used to flavor the rest of the dish. Sai grog issan, above, is a northern-style sausage made from rice, glass noodles and just a sprinkling of pork, which are stuffed into the intestine and tied into balls, grilled and cut to order. At 1 baht per ball, they’re extremely cheap and they’re also quite tasty. The bowl of wide rice noodles with spicy pork gravy below doesn’t have heaps of ground meat, just the flavor of the bones and bits of fatty meat and a small bit of coagulated blood. I think there might be more flavor in acknowledging what you’re eating. I’ll take bones and blood, those reminders of a dish’s animal origins, over a bloodless, dissociated hunk of tasteless meat any day.
Wide Rice Noodles with Spicy Pork Gravy
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