The bowl is built from the bottom up. Burdock, taro, carrot, daikon, shiitake, tofu, small shrimp, chicken, sea bream, all prepared beforehand and laid in first. Dashi is poured over them. Then rice goes on top of everything.

Lift the lid and what you see is a bowl of plain white rice.

That is the entire idea. Under the Edo-period sumptuary rule in this domain, ordinary people could not be seen eating luxuries, and the account is that they buried the good things under the rice instead. Uzumi comes from the word for burying.

The stock changes with the geography. Toward the Inland Sea in the south it is made with dried sardine; up in the northern hills, with dried shiitake. Until the 1960s this was a dish for celebrating the autumn harvest, brought out once a year. Since 1990 it has been served in school lunches in Fukuyama, which is a strange afterlife for a dish designed to keep an inspector from seeing what you had. There are relatives of it elsewhere in the region, too, including uzume-meshi in Iwami in Shimane and the scattered sushi of Bizen in Okayama, which suggests the habit of hiding food was not confined to one domain. The concealment stopped being necessary. The shape it produced stayed.