A layer of lard sits on the surface of the soup, and no steam comes off it. In a city where winter temperatures fall a long way below freezing, that film is there to stop the bowl going cold before you have finished it. The practical consequence is that the first mouthful is much hotter than it looks.

Two stocks go into it. Pork and chicken bone on one side; dried sardine and kelp on the other. Asahikawa was a pig-farming town, and the bone broth began as a way of using what the trade left over — but bone broth smells, so seafood stock was brought in to hold the smell down. More than sixty-five per cent of the shops here still combine the two.

The noodles are thin, wavy, and made from a dough with very little water in it, between twenty-five and twenty-nine per cent. Low-hydration noodles are firmer and they carry more soup up out of the bowl with them.

Two shops opening in 1947 already had all of this in place, which is early — the double stock and the low-hydration noodle were both there from the start rather than arrived at later. Sapporo is spoken of as miso and Hakodate as salt; Asahikawa is soy sauce. Three cities on one island, each arriving at a different answer, none of them borrowing from the others.