Chicken and burdock, both dusted with potato starch and deep fried separately, then tossed together with edamame in a sweet-salty sauce made of sugar and soy sauce.

The origin is 1995, and for a regional dish it is unusually well documented. A school nutrition teacher decided that the lunch menus were becoming repetitive, and so she put out a call for recipes from the children's own homes.

One of the recipes that came back was this one. It had been devised by a pupil's grandmother, who had already been making it at home since around 1980 without anyone outside the family knowing. The name was invented at the same moment, chosen deliberately because it had a rhythm to it and children would repeat it to each other.

From the school lunches it moved into the households of the children who were eating them, and from those households it spread outward through the town by word of mouth alone. It is now made right across Yamaguchi prefecture, and restaurants there list it on the menu. One grandmother's weeknight dish ended up being what an entire prefecture eats, on the strength of a teacher deciding to ask a question of the children in front of her.