There was a coal mine in the Ogawa district of Iwaizumi, up in the mountains of Iwate. More than a thousand miners lived there with their families. A shop called Azumaya served a hormone hot pot that the miners took to, and it became the thing the district ate.

The mine closed in 1995. The shop closed too. What did not close was the dish itself, which had by then spread through the town and out of the hands of any single kitchen that could shut its doors.

Pork offal and chicken thigh together in the same pot, cabbage, scallion, and tofu made by hand by a local producer. The seasoning has no sweetness in it at all, which is unusual for a Japanese hot pot, and it is loaded with garlic and pepper and carries a low burn. Every shop mixes its own: soy-based, miso-based, a garlic miso version.

The chamber of commerce currently lists nine restaurants serving it and eight shops selling it to take home. That is a reasonable density for a town of this size, and it means the food designed to refuel men coming off a shift has outlived the shift, the mine, and the shop that invented it. The pot stayed on the stove and the work itself went away, which is not the order anyone would have predicted.