Chicken and root vegetables, simmered together and finished with barley miso. The story attached to it is unusually specific. Satsuma samurai in the Edo period held cockfights, justified as a way of keeping martial spirit up, and the losing bird was killed on the spot and cooked with whatever vegetables were around. That is where the soup is said to begin.

Cockfighting was later banned, and the soup did not go with it. Households in Kagoshima kept chickens loose in the yard, and when guests arrived or a celebration came round, a bird was taken and the same pot was made. The occasion shifted from a contest between men to the arrival of someone at the door.

Into it go dried shiitake, konnyaku, burdock, carrot, daikon, taro, and the barley miso common across Kyushu, which makes the broth a little sweeter than miso soup elsewhere. The bowl ends up crowded. You eat it with chopsticks more than with a spoon.

I like that the surviving half of the origin is the hospitable half. Whatever the cockfights were for, what lasted three centuries was a pot made because company came. These days no season is prescribed, though it turns up most in cold weather, for the obvious reason that it is filling and hot.