Raw rice goes into the pouch, not cooked rice. A large sheet of fried tofu is opened out, filled with uncooked grains and slivers of carrot and burdock, closed with a toothpick, and set to cook slowly in a broth of kelp and dried sardine. The rice swells inside the bag as it drinks.

It takes a long time and cannot be hurried. Rush it and you get hard grains at the centre. Done properly, the pouch is heavy and taut, and biting into it releases the broth it has been sitting in all afternoon.

A priest in Sakaiminato is said to have started it in the middle of the Meiji period, after eating a fried tofu dish served as temple food in Fukui and carrying the idea home with him. Rice was precious then, and this was a way of making a small quantity of it fill somebody up properly. It was made on festival days and carried round to the neighbours.

The name has two explanations: the ordinary humble verb for receiving something, spoken by people to whom this arrived as a gift, or else the shape of the summit of Mount Daisen, which stands over the whole peninsula. It is also called nonoko meshi, after a padded winter jacket, because that is what a well-filled one looks like. Both names describe it from the outside.