In Fukui, katsudon means this and only this. No egg, nothing bound together, nothing simmered. A thin fried pork cutlet is passed through Worcestershire sauce and laid on rice, and that is the dish.

It was devised by a man called Takabatake Masutaro. He spent several years training as a cook in Germany and came home in 1912; the following year he presented this at a cookery demonstration in Tokyo. His stated motive was to spread in Japan the German-style Worcestershire sauce he had learned to use, and a bowl of rice was simply the vehicle he chose to carry it in.

He later returned to Fukui, his home, and opened a restaurant there, and the version served in the city today descends directly from that kitchen.

The cutlet is thin and tender enough to cut with chopsticks. It is not trying to impress anybody with thickness, and being thin is the entire point: the sauce reaches all the way through instead of sitting on the surface. Elsewhere in the country the same word describes a bowl bound with egg and simmered in broth. This is a different dish wearing the same name, and in Fukui it is the one that needs no qualifier — in homes as much as in restaurants.