There is no jelly in it. Okara and boiled potato are mashed together with carrot and spring onion, shaped into a flat oval, and deep-fried without any batter at all. It comes out of the oil and goes straight through a pan of brown sauce.

The same town also sells something it simply calls fry, and that one is not fried. Batter is spread thin on a griddle, spring onion and meat and egg are worked into it, and sauce is brushed over the top. The names look as though they were handed to the wrong dishes, and nobody here is going to correct them.

The first name is supposed to come from the shape. It resembles an old oval coin, so it was called zeni-furai, coin fry, and the word wore down into something that sounds like jelly. Another account points at cloth, which was what this town manufactured, and derives the second half from that instead. Neither has been settled.

Northern Saitama has grown wheat for a very long time, and the griddled version began as something farmhouses made for themselves: cheap, portable, filling. In the early Showa years, when Gyoda was covered in tabi factories, it caught on with the women working in them, and shops opened to sell it. The fried one travelled the same road. Both are made of the least expensive things in a kitchen, and both survived because they fitted into a factory lunch break.