The early version was miso. A shallow iron pan, beef cut into rough chunks, and a miso-based sauce to simmer it in. In Tokyo another form developed, using a soy-and-sugar broth with spring onion as the only vegetable, and nothing else in the pan at all.

Yokohama opened to foreign trade in 1859. Residents in the settlement ate meat, and demand followed. Cattle came in from the Chinese mainland and from America; later, Japanese cattle from the Kansai and Chugoku regions were brought up through Kobe to supply the port.

A shop in Irifune-cho in Yokohama is recorded as serving beef hotpot in 1862, and that is taken as the first instance anywhere. A silk merchant was doing the same thing that year. In 1868 Takahashi Otokichi opened the restaurant Ota Nawanoren, using the shallow pan and the miso, and it is still trading.

In 1871 the writer Kanagaki Robun published a book set in one of these establishments, and produced the line that fixed the dish in the public mind: anyone who does not eat beef hotpot is an unenlightened fellow. For a period of perhaps twenty years, whether you ate this was taken as a straightforward measure of whether you belonged to the new century.