Roasted bancha is brewed strong, dried tea flowers are dropped in, and the whole thing is whipped with a long bamboo whisk until it stands in foam. Into the foam go small quantities of steamed rice, simmered beans, chopped pickles, shredded freeze-dried tofu, sometimes a scrap of fish cake and a spoon of mixed grains. No chopsticks are provided. You tap the base of the bowl to gather the solids to one side and tip the lot into your mouth.

The name is said to come from the sound the whisking makes against the side of the bowl. Bote, bote. Nothing about it is elegant, and nobody has tried to make it so.

Where it came from is not settled. One account has it as the working food of the men who ran the tatara iron furnaces. Another attributes it to the lord of Matsue, a famous tea man, as something to eat in an emergency or while out hawking. A third says it was simply how ordinary townspeople took their tea. What the three have in common is that it can be done standing up, with one hand, in the middle of something else.

Is it tea, or is it a meal? Do you drink it or eat it? Nobody in Matsue has ever needed to decide the question, and the bowl is still handed over exactly as it always was.