Wet Thar Chin, Shan Sour Pork

In the markets of the Shan hills, alongside the tofu and the pickled mustard, you will find neat banana-leaf parcels tied with string, their contents firm and rosy and smelling like a handshake between a salami and a lime. This is wet thar chin — sour pork — the hills' way of keeping their excellent pork beyond the day of slaughter: minced meat kneaded with salt, garlic, and cooked sticky rice, wrapped tight, and left to sour for a few warm days while lactic bacteria do the preserving.

It belongs to a great arc of fermented pork that runs through the Tai world — Thailand's naem and the Lao and Vietnamese cousins are the same idea in different wrappers — and the Shan version sits at its northern, garlicky end. Documentation, as with most hill preserves, is thin and mostly colonial-era, when market-town accounts began noticing what the hills had long been making; the practice itself is plainly far older. Households eat it every way a preserve can be eaten, but the classic is the one given here: fried hard with garlic and dried chilies until the edges brown, then piled over rice with raw cabbage and cucumber standing coolly by.

Read the fermentation notes before you begin — fresh pork, full salt, and a short, warm, well-watched ferment are the discipline of the dish, and this version is always cooked through before serving. The reward for that care is remarkable: pork that tastes louder than pork, sour and savory at once, the flavor of the hills' long memory for making good things last.