Communal Table · Minced Meat Salad

Larb (Isaan Minced Meat Salad)

Photo: Jpatokal / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

In old Lao-Isaan society, mixing this dish well enough to serve at a wedding or New Year feast was considered such a skilled task it was reserved for the household's most accomplished cooks.

Minced pork, chicken or duck is tossed raw or briefly cooked with lime juice, fish sauce, ground toasted rice, chili powder, shallots and torn mint leaves. It's scooped up with balls of sticky rice and eaten alongside raw cabbage and long beans as a cooling contrast.

Why it's made this way: Larb's roots trace to Laos, where it remains the national dish, and it crossed into Isaan through the region's deep Lao ethnic ties — a 1751 Qing-dynasty Chinese account of tributary peoples already described the Lao as a people who 'like to eat raw meat.'