Dried broad beans, roasted dry in a shallow earthenware pan over a low flame for twenty or thirty minutes, until they colour and begin to scorch. Then, while they are still hot, they go straight into a liquid of soy sauce, sugar and chilli, and sit in it overnight. Nothing is ever simmered, and that is the point of the entire dish.

Because they were roasted first, they break rather than yield. The skin holds its shape while the inside crumbles, dry and very slightly powdery, with none of the heaviness a simmered bean carries. It is an odd texture to meet for the first time, and it is quite hard to stop.

There is a story about the beginning. A woman was roasting beans to hand to pilgrims walking the island's temple circuit, and one rolled off into a jar of soy sauce standing nearby; when she fished it out later and tried it, it was better than what she had been making. Others say the dish began on Shodoshima, where soy sauce brewing started at the end of the sixteenth century. Both accounts are still in circulation, and nobody seems anxious to settle it.

Some households put these on the new year table where the sweet black beans would normally go. It is not a substitution anyone apologises for. Salt and chilli against sugar and ceremony — you can see how the argument runs.