Stock is taken from chicken, vegetables are simmered in a soy-seasoned broth, and then a wheat cracker is broken up by hand and dropped in. It does not immediately dissolve. It softens gradually and holds a chew for a surprisingly long time, which is the whole reason anyone would put a baked cracker into a pot of soup in the first place.

Nanbu senbei is flour, salt and water baked in an iron mould. It belongs to the territory of the old Nanbu domain, the south-east corner of Aomori and the north of Iwate, and before the war most farming households owned one of those moulds. In a region hit repeatedly by cold summers, it was what you had when the rice failed.

The soup itself is dated to the Tenpo famine, late in the Edo period. The yamase, a cold wind off the sea, kept the rice from ripening, so wheat and other grains were planted instead. Dumplings made from that wheat went into the pot, and eventually the more durable baked cracker took their place.

A region that could not reliably grow rice, baking its wheat into a hard cracker so that it would keep, and then softening the cracker back down again in a pot of soup. The circle closes in the bowl.