Chicken marinated in a sauce, thrown onto a hot iron plate with a mound of cabbage, cooked hard and eaten straight off the steel. Some households build the sauce on miso and some on soy, and the argument between the two is regional and unresolvable. Garlic and ginger go into both of them.

It started with hens that had stopped laying. During the war and the years just after it, a bird that had finished its working life was not thrown away, and the meat of an old laying hen is tough and full of flavour and needs exactly this treatment. The marinade was not a refinement. It was a way of making the bird chewable.

When poultry farming grew large in the late 1950s the supply of spent hens became steady — a few every day, arriving whether anybody wanted them or not — and butchers and small restaurants in the district began selling the dish across a counter. Each of them adjusted it as they went. That is where the variations come from.

The territory is Gujo and Gero and the hills lying between them, and people will tell you the seasoning changes when you cross a ridge. It began at home and reached the shops afterwards, which is the opposite of the usual direction of travel. There is something honest about a dish that was a solution before it was ever a menu item.