A bone-in chicken thigh is seasoned with salt, pepper and garlic and cooked slowly until the fat has rendered out and the skin has tightened. It comes to the table whole, on a hot plate, and you pick it up and eat it with your hands. There is no arrangement provided for doing this politely, and none is expected.

The dish starts in 1952, in a shop of about twenty-three square metres near Marugame station that was selling oden and okonomiyaki. The owner had seen an actress in a Hollywood film tearing into a roast chicken leg and wondered whether he could put something like it on his own menu. He and his wife began selling it the following year, in 1953.

There are two versions. Oyadori, the older bird, is tough and gives up its flavour slowly under the teeth. Hinadori is young and soft. Which of the two a person orders tells you roughly how long they have lived in Kagawa, and regulars will tell you the older bird is the point of the whole exercise.

Cabbage comes on the side, and you use it to mop the fat that has run onto the plate. For some people that is the actual reason they are there. In a prefecture known for what it eats at lunchtime, this is what it eats at night.