Boiled azuki beans in their own sweet liquid, with small red and white rice-flour dumplings dropped in. There is nothing else in the bowl. What is unusual about it is where the name came from.

In Izumo the gods are said to gather in the tenth month of the old calendar. At Sada shrine there is a rite on the twenty-fifth of November for seeing them off again, and during it the rice cakes that had been set before the shrine were boiled together with azuki and offered a second time, and the resulting dish was called jinzai-mochi, the cake of the gods' presence. Jinzai is held to have slurred into zenzai, which is what the whole country now calls sweet bean soup.

A domain gazetteer compiled at Matsue records the same thing from the other side: on the festival day, it says, ordinary people in every house boiled white rice cakes with azuki and called the result jinzai-mochi. On the strength of that, this is where the dish is said to have started.

New year soup in Izumo is also made with azuki rather than clear stock. Sweetness, celebration and religious observance all run together here, in one colour. That red in the bowl is doing more work than it looks like it is doing.