The Inland Sea supports a large anchovy fishery, and the fish that come out of it are dried into iriko. The waters around Ibukijima, off the western side of Kagawa, make up one of the main producing areas.

The timing is the thing that matters. Anchovies caught in those waters reach the island and go into the boiling vats within about thirty minutes of coming out of the sea. Catching and processing are handled by the same operators, continuously and without a handover, and that unbroken chain is what the quality here is attributed to.

Iriko meshi is simply those dried fish cooked together with the rice. It started out as fishermen's food, made with the one thing that was to hand in quantity.

I had assumed iriko was a stock ingredient, something you simmer and then discard. Here the bodies are eaten as well, in simmered dishes and fried in tempura batter, and they are described as one of the foods the local culture rests on. It is made all year round, without regard to any season at all, and it turns up regularly in school lunches. Somewhere in that it occurred to me that the word for spent stock ingredients probably does not get much use on this island.