A white miso broth with a round mochi in it, and inside the mochi, sweet red bean paste. Alongside it, daikon and kintoki carrot cut into rounds, and tofu. The vegetables are cut in circles deliberately, as a wish that the household stay round, meaning whole and without friction.

The sugar is the point of the dish. In the Edo period Kagawa was warm and dry and the domain promoted sugarcane, and the white sugar produced here became one of the three white products of Sanuki, alongside cotton and salt. But sugar was valuable and ordinary households did not eat it.

So from around the Meiji era, once a year, a family would take out the sugar it had been keeping and put it into the new year soup. That is the account given for how this began. Not a culinary experiment. A single deliberate extravagance, scheduled annually.

The white miso has its own story. It is said to have come to Sanuki with the people travelling from Kyoto to attend the exiled emperor Sutoku, who was sent here after losing the Hogen rebellion in the twelfth century. Two imported luxuries, the sugar and the Kyoto miso, meeting each other in a single bowl on the first morning of the year.