Aizu is deep inland, and what appears at its celebrations is seafood. Dried scallop is soaked back to life and the soaking water becomes the stock. Into it go small beads of wheat gluten, taro, wood ear, carrot, and threads of konjac. Sake and soy sauce season it, lightly. Nothing in the bowl is large, and nothing in it is fresh.

It is served out of a large lacquered bowl into small red lacquer dishes, one for each person at the table. The vessels register before the soup does. This is Aizu lacquerware, and the food appears to have been arranged around it rather than the other way about.

There is a rule attached to it. At a formal celebration, asking for a second helping would be rude, except of this. The explanation handed down is that a household unable to lay on anything lavish would say: we have nothing grand for you, but of this you may have as much as you like.

Fresh fish could not be got here for a wedding or a new year, whatever anyone was willing to pay for it. So the feast was built out of things that had been dried somewhere else and carried in over the passes. A menu assembled entirely from what was missing became the face of the region's best days.