In Osaka, conger eel goes into kamaboko. The flesh is scraped off the bones for the fish paste, and what is left when that is done is the skin.

At some point somebody stood and looked at the pile of skin. The small bones are picked out of it one by one, the skin is brushed with soy sauce and passed briefly over a flame, and then it is cut into thin strips and dressed with cucumber in sweet vinegar. That is hamokawa no zakuzaku.

The name is a sound. Zakuzaku is either the noise of the cucumber being cut on the board or the noise of the finished dish being eaten, and nobody appears to have settled which of the two it is. Summer is the season for it, and there is a local saying that hamo only becomes properly good once it has drunk the rains of the rainy season. Around the time of the Tenjin festival in July it was made more or less constantly.

The literature describes it as an expression of shimatsu no seishin, the Osaka principle of using things up without waste, which is accurate and slightly flattens it. What I like is smaller than that. The thing that was going to be thrown away is the thing that ended up with a name made out of a noise.