Kanpyo is the flesh of a bottle gourd, peeled off in one continuous ribbon and dried. The peeling is done by hand, and the price a grower gets depends on whether the ribbon comes away long and unbroken.

The pieces that snapped, or came out uneven in width, cannot be sold. Throwing them away was more than anyone was prepared to do, so they went into soup instead, and that is where this dish is said to have started.

The dried strips are rubbed with salt, washed, and boiled until they will pull apart between finger and thumb. They are cut into lengths of a couple of centimetres and stirred into beaten egg. Seasoned dashi is brought to the boil, the egg mixture goes in, and the moment it sets soft the pan comes off the heat.

The crop is said to have arrived in the Mibu domain, here in Shimotsuke, in 1712. The gourd suits volcanic-ash soil and hot summers, and it is grown now around Utsunomiya, Kaminokawa, Shimotsuke and Mibu. More than nine-tenths of the country's kanpyo still comes from this prefecture. That is not a small share. Which is the whole explanation: being the place that makes something means being the place with the failures, and a dish exists here for no other reason than that the failures had to go somewhere.