Whilst at the supermarket today I picked up a packet of หมูสะดุ้ง. Not had it before. It looked OK. Lots of pork ribs in a thick, brown sauce. No veggies apart from a few pieces of spring onion and coriander leaf. On eating, the sauce tasted rather like very bad, English gravy made with hydrolysed vegetable protein. I then went to look up recipes on the Internet to find out what it should have been, and the answers range from a pork salad to something resembling หมูมะนาว to sweet/sour pork with pineapple. Can anyone tell me what this dish is supposed to be, and why the pig is startled?

I can't answer your question of the recipe, but I think หมูสะดุ้ง is just pork that is suddenly put in boiling hot water. If you want to make หมูมะนาว you start with หมูสะดุ้ง and add some extras. In the recipe you had they put some unknown sauce on the pork.

On a sidenote:

You should type the vowel before you type the tonemark

You should type the vowel before you type the tonemark

As AyG was typing in Unicode and they're either side of the consonant, officially it shouldn't matter which order they're typed in. A process converting the string to TIS-620 should order them so the vowel comes first, whichever order they appear in in Unicode.