Migaki-nishin is herring with the head and innards removed, dried until it is hard and dark and rattles in the box. Before it can be cooked it has to be soaked overnight — traditionally in the water left from rinsing rice, which softens it and takes the sharpness out of the smell.

Tochigi has no coast. Fresh fish did not become an ordinary thing to eat here until refrigeration spread, which is well within living memory. For everything before that, dried fish carried in from elsewhere was the protein that could be relied on.

Once it has softened the small bones are picked out, and the fish is cut up with bamboo shoots and simmered in soy sauce and sugar under a dropped lid over a moderate flame. The fish gives itself to the shoots, and by the end the bamboo is the more interesting half of the dish.

There is a name for it: taue-nishin, rice-planting herring. On the day the paddies were planted, this was set out to entertain the gods and to feed the neighbours who had come to help, and it appeared again at the celebration when the planting was finished. In a province with no sea, the fish was what you served on the day the most people were in your house.