These are not the peanuts you know. Freshly dug, still damp, still in the shell, they go into water with about three per cent salt and boil for forty to fifty minutes. What comes out is soft, pale and faintly sweet, closer to a boiled chestnut or a green soybean than to anything that has been roasted.

They can only be made where they are grown. Raw peanuts start hardening and losing flavour from the moment they leave the ground, so the distance between the field and the pot has to be short. That also fixes the season: the harvest runs from September to the end of November, and outside those weeks the real thing is simply not available.

The plateau in this prefecture produces more than seven-tenths of the country's crop, which makes the local indifference towards roasted peanuts faintly comic. People here talk about the boiled ones the way people elsewhere talk about the first bamboo shoots of the year.

Split a shell and the bean inside is wet and heavy. There is none of the toasted smell you have braced yourself for, and for a second the absence registers as a mistake. Then the sweetness turns up, and you understand that the dry version you have been eating all your life is a preserved form of something that was never meant to travel.