Cucumber is cut into thin rounds and worked with salt until it goes soft, then dressed with boiled octopus in vinegar. That is the whole dish, and it takes a few minutes.

The salting used to be real labor. The cucumbers grown here for pickling, the Yamato sanjaku and the hanjiro varieties, had firm flesh that had to be worked at length. A modern cucumber needs only a light rub with salt and it is done, which is a small measure of how much the vegetable itself has changed.

Octopus is treated as an auspicious food here, and it appears at weddings and at the first shrine visit made for a newborn child.

It is also eaten at sanaburi, the observance held once the rice planting is finished, when people pray for a good harvest in autumn. The reasoning behind that is worth stating plainly, because it is entirely visual: an octopus has suckers, and it grips. The wish attached to the dish is that the rice seedlings should take hold in the ground the same way. It is made across the prefecture, and it is eaten with a drink as readily as at a ceremony. The whole basis of the prayer is the shape of a sucker on the arm of an animal that lives in the sea, applied to a field of rice a long way inland.