It has the shape of a pork cutlet bowl. What is lying on the rice, however, is not pork. It is wheat gluten, cut into rounds and deep-fried.

The gluten is made by working flour and water and then washing the starch out of the dough until only the elastic part remains; more flour goes back in, the mass is formed into a stick, and the stick is fried in oil. A tofu shop in Tome is said to have worked this out at the end of the Meiji period, as a thing to sell alongside the tofu.

For the bowl, the fried gluten is simmered in dashi and soy sauce and then set with beaten egg. It drinks. The longer it sits in the broth the thicker it gets, and biting into a piece releases a mouthful of liquid. The texture is nothing like meat. The wetness is remarkably like it.

The gluten sticks have since found a second life as an ingredient for people who do not eat meat at all, which was not what the tofu shop had in mind. The bowl itself was the idea of a woman running an inn in the town, who put the gluten where the cutlet would go. This is a district where the tofu shops turn to vegetarian work every August, for the festival of the dead, when meat is set aside. A meatless bowl that eats like a meat bowl was not a novelty here. There was already a reason to want one.