Kyoto sits a long way from the sea, and yet fish appears on the summer table here. Hamo is the reason. It is one of the few fish stubborn enough to survive the journey, so that even before refrigeration, eels taken in Osaka Bay or the Akashi Strait could be carried over the hills and arrive in the city still alive.

The problem with it is the bones. There are a great many of them, fine and closely spaced, and the solution is a knife technique in which the blade comes down through the flesh again and again without ever cutting the skin beneath it. Twenty-six cuts within an inch is the figure people quote for a cook who has finished learning.

Drop that scored flesh into boiling water and it does something worth waiting for. Every cut opens, the piece curls back on itself, and what rises to the surface is white and splayed like a flower. That movement is what the dish is named after. It comes with plum paste, or a mustard and vinegar miso, and nothing else at all.

It peaks during the Gion Festival, which some people simply call the hamo festival. So the fish that defines high summer in a landlocked city was chosen not for its flavour but for its endurance. Taste came second. The road came first.