This is made in the Reihoku part of Fukui between early October and late February, and only then. Sweet amazake is prepared from rice koji, bean koji is stirred into it, and then salted eggplant, shiso seed, ginger, sesame, and chili go in. After about twenty days it is ready.

The account of where it came from runs through a specific person. Its ancestor is hamanatto from Hamamatsu. Tokugawa Ieyasu is said to have been fond of that, and when his second son Yuki Hideyasu became lord of the Kita-no-sho domain after Sekigahara, he brought Hamamatsu's food habits into Echizen with him. The thing then changed shape to suit a colder place, and became a winter keeping-food.

You eat it as it is. With sake, on rice, smeared on grilled mochi or raw cucumber. It is dark and salty and faintly sweet, and full of the soft collapsed texture of the pickled eggplant running through it.

The seasonal limit is the part worth noticing. Nothing about the recipe demands winter. What demanded winter was the household calendar: this was made when there was time to make it and eaten when there was not much else, and that timing has now outlasted the necessity behind it by several generations.