In Akashi they call it tamagoyaki, egg-cooked, and the local name is more honest than the one the rest of the country uses. Order it expecting a relative of okonomiyaki and something else arrives: pale, wobbling, so soft that chopsticks are close to useless, set out in rows on a wooden board tilted towards you.

The batter is mostly egg, with wheat starch as well as wheat flour, and it is cooked in a copper pan. There is octopus inside, from the fast water off this coast. No sauce goes anywhere near it. You lift each one into a bowl of hot dashi and eat it out of the broth, which is the part that startles visitors most.

One account of its beginning involves jewellery. The town used to manufacture imitation coral out of egg white, which left a great many yolks with nowhere in particular to go, and the dish is said to have grown out of that surplus. Whether it started at the end of the Edo period or around 1890 depends on who is telling it.

It is also named as one of the ancestors of takoyaki. If that is right, this is the branch of the family that stayed with dashi while the other branch went off towards sauce and mayonnaise and a paper tray on a street corner. Both are still going. Only one of them needs a bowl.