Shiiba is a mountain village on the border with Kumamoto, and it carries a Heike refugee legend of its own. The Kamigata speech of the old capital region is still used in daily conversation there, and some of what is cooked has a Kyoto quality to it. This tofu is one of those things.

In spring, rape blossoms, mountain wisteria flowers, and mitsuba all go into it. From autumn through into spring it is heike-kabu, a green resembling nozawana, boiled first and then folded through the curd before it has set. Cut a block of it open and there is green scattered right the way through the white.

The stated reasons for adding all of this are color, flavor, and nourishment. But the main one is volume. Soybeans were precious and hard to come by that far up in the mountains, and greens that would grow in poor soil made the block of tofu bigger without anyone having to use more of them.

It was made for festivals, for weddings, for funerals and memorial services, whenever people gathered in numbers. Which means that the dish which came out on all the important days was, in its actual construction, a method for making a small quantity of beans go further than it should have.