Balls of konnyaku about three centimetres across are cooked in soy sauce, with no water added to the pan at any stage. Torn strips of dried squid go in with them, and the pot is stirred over heat until almost all of the liquid has gone. Three or four of them go onto a bamboo skewer, with a dab of hot yellow mustard on the side.

Konnyaku itself is said to have arrived with the priest who founded the mountain temple of Risshaku-ji in 860, brought back from China and used in the temple's vegetarian cooking. The round shape came very much later. One account credits the founder of a company established in 1887, who is supposed to have taken the idea from the skewered mitarashi dumplings sold at shrines. Another says that in the mid-1920s there was no money for a mould of any kind, so the balls were simply rolled by hand and sold that way.

At any event in Yamagata you will see people walking along eating these, talking as they go, skewer in one hand and nothing else required. The prefecture gets through a great deal of konnyaku, more than most.

Temple food, sold from a stall, on a stick. It took about eleven hundred years to get from one to the other.