Sardine fishing has been the business of Kujukuri and Choshi since the Edo period. The problem with sardines is not catching them. It is that they spoil fast, faster than almost anything else that comes out of these waters, and a boat could land more in a morning than a town could eat in a day.

So the answer was to change their state. Grinding them to a paste and cooking it, or drying them, bought time. This soup belongs to that family of solutions.

Cleaned sardines are cut into chunks and worked in a mortar until they are smooth, with ginger and sake added as they go, and the paste is then formed into balls by hand. The balls go into a kombu stock seasoned with soy sauce and cook there briefly, giving up as much as they take. In the finished bowl they are soft enough to come apart against the roof of your mouth without any pressure at all.

Reading about it afterward I found myself thinking that this is what abundance actually requires. Not a way to catch more, but a way to receive what is already there without watching it rot on the sand. The technique itself is the point of the exercise, and the fact that the result happens to be delicious is very close to accidental.