Dried herring and daikon, pickled with koji. The herring is washed and cut in two, the daikon cut into strips roughly ten centimeters long and a centimeter thick, and the two are layered in a vessel with koji, dried chili, and sake scattered between each layer. It is ready in two to four weeks.

The herring did not come from here. Fukui's Reinan coast had ports at Mikuni, Kono, and Tsuruga, all of them stops on the kitamaebune route, and prosperity brought food habits along with cargo. Of everything that came down from the north, the accounts single out two things as being in a class of their own: kelp and herring.

Timing matters. Packed in summer, a batch reaches its best during the busy autumn work, when nobody has time to cook. Households pickled with whatever the season offered too, eggplant, cucumber, melon, so the practice ran from summer through winter without a break.

It appears in the new year osechi as an auspicious dish. There is something quietly odd about that arrangement. On a table well inland, at the most formal meal of the entire year, sits a fish that was caught off Hokkaido and dried on a beach before it ever started coming south.