Suji-ebi from Lake Biwa and soybeans, simmered together sweet and salty. That is the whole dish.

Both halves of it were within reach here. Soybeans were grown on the banks between the paddies, using land that grew nothing else. The shrimp live throughout the shallow weedy margins of the lake, moving to under ten meters through the spawning months from spring into summer, and in winter they are taken by drag net out near Okishima.

The method is unhurried. Soak the beans overnight and boil them. In a separate pot bring soy sauce, sugar, and sake to the boil and put the shrimp in. When the color turns, add the beans and reduce for about twenty minutes, finishing with mirin to coat everything.

It shows up at celebrations, at memorial services, at festivals, and at new year, and the reason given for the last of these is a pun. May you live diligently until you are bent like a shrimp: mame means both bean and diligent, and the shrimp supplies the bent back. It is cheap, it keeps, and it turns up in school lunches and supermarkets as readily as at ceremonies. What it does is put what the lake has and what the field has into the same bowl, which no other prefecture is placed to do in quite this way.