The rice is faintly brown all the way through. Stock is drawn from the bones and trimmings of the conger eel, and the rice is cooked in that; then grilled eel is laid across the top, edge to edge, with no gaps. The same fish appears twice in the box, the frame of it underneath and the flesh of it above, and neither half knows about the other.

It began as a station lunch. In 1901 a man named Ueno Tanekichi started selling it at Miyajimaguchi, the station where you get off for the boat to the shrine island. He had taken the idea from a bowl of eel over rice that the local fishermen were already eating, and rebuilt it into something a traveller could carry.

Conger is at its best in summer and again in the middle of January, and people here will tell you the January fish is the better of the two. Which is awkward, because the island fills up in summer and empties in winter. The season and the crowd do not coincide, and never have.

It is built to be eaten cold. Not merely to survive being cold — designed for it, seasoned for it, packed for it. The original way to eat this was sitting on a bench with a boat still out on the water, and every box sold today is still shaped by that fifteen minutes of waiting.