Short and extraordinarily thick. The white part of one of these leeks is wider than a thumb and the whole plant stands lower than the ones in a supermarket, which makes it look, on the stall, like something that failed to grow properly. Eat a piece of it raw and it is fierce, hot enough that you will not go back for a second.

Heat undoes all of that. The fibres let go, the sharpness leaves, and what remains is sweet and very nearly liquid. Simmered in the broth of a sukiyaki pot it loses its edges completely and drinks up the sauce, and it is common to watch people at the table reach past the beef for the leek instead.

A document kept by a family in the town, dated to the eleventh month of 1805, orders two hundred of them sent up at once and states that the carriage may cost whatever it costs. Hence the local name for them: the lord's leek. It is a rare vegetable that can produce the invoice that made it famous.

Growing them is laborious. The plant sleeps through the summer, so a crop set out in spring is lifted from the ground partway through the year, sorted through, and planted again. Behind one leek on a winter table there is an entire summer of somebody digging things up and putting them back.