Curry powder is worked into fish paste. The paste is flattened, crumbed and deep-fried, and what comes out is faintly yellow inside and smells emphatically of curry. Fish and spice meeting in the middle of a fried cutlet is not an obvious idea, and somebody in this prefecture had it anyway.

A kamaboko maker in Komatsushima is credited with putting it on sale just after the war. It belongs to the family of pressed fish products, but it is not kamaboko and it is not the fried kind either. It found a shape of its own and stayed there.

It sits in supermarkets now, and in convenience stores, ready to eat straight out of the packet. Some people squeeze sudachi over it. Some use soy sauce, some use brown sauce, some use mayonnaise. It goes on top of curry and it goes into sandwiches, and no version of this is considered incorrect by anybody.

It belongs, technically, to the family of pressed fish products that this coast has been making for centuries, and it is the only member of that family with curry in it. Foods like this grow up outside the house rather than inside it. Somebody makes a thing, other people eat it however they feel like eating it, and the habit spreads without anyone writing it down. Having no rules is the rule this particular cutlet observes.