There is no salt in these noodles. Flour and water and nothing else, because the broth is miso and the salt already in it would push the whole bowl past edible if the noodles brought their own along. Salt is also what makes a noodle pliable, so leaving it out gives you something distinctly hard.

That hard noodle goes into the pot raw. It is not boiled first and then transferred; it cooks in the miso itself, which means the starch comes off it into the broth and thickens it and clouds it over. Cooks elsewhere would call the result underdone. Here it is the object of the exercise.

The pot is a small earthenware one, a single portion, and it reaches the table still boiling. You take the lid off, turn it over, and it becomes your bowl. You ladle noodles and broth into it and let them cool for a moment, because the pot itself is not going to cool for a very long time.

The miso is the bean kind, the dark one made in this region and almost nowhere else, and it holds its flavour through long cooking in a way that lighter misos do not. A noodle that refuses to soften and a miso that refuses to fade. Two stubborn things, reaching an arrangement in a small clay pot.