Manba is a variety of takana, and its season runs from October through to April. It carries a distinctive bitterness, an aku, that has to be dealt with before anything else in the recipe can happen.

The name of the plant is worth having. Leaves are taken from the outside of the plant, and the plant simply keeps sprouting new ones to replace them, so it came to be called manba, ten thousand leaves. The second half of the dish name, kenchan, is a worn-down form of kenchin, the shippoku preparation of shredded vegetables fried with tofu.

The method runs like this: boil the manba first to draw out the bitterness, fry it together with tofu and fried tofu, break the tofu up with the spatula as you go, then simmer the whole thing with dashi and seasoning until it comes together.

After that, the cold weather does the rest of the work. Repeated frosts soften the leaves and bring the sugar up in them, so the plant is at its very best exactly when there is least else growing anywhere. Two facts explain why this appears on Kagawa tables over and over through the winter: a green that regrows as fast as you can pick it, and a frost that keeps arriving and improving it.