Taro, thick fried tofu, daikon, carrot, dried shiitake, konnyaku, all simmered together in a stock made from kombu and from the water the shiitake were soaked back in. No fish, no meat: this is temple cooking.

The thickness in the broth is not something added to it. No starch goes into the pot at any point. The taro breaks down as it cooks and does it by itself.

Noppe was originally noppei, written with characters that mean thick and rice cake, and versions of it turn up across the northeast and along the Japan Sea coast.

The occasion it belongs to is fixed, and it is a single week of the year. The On-matsuri at Kasuga Taisha falls on the seventeenth of December, and on the fifteenth, at the Oyadokoro rite where the yamato-zamurai who conduct the festival purify themselves, this is served to them and to whoever has come. The festival dates to 1136, when famine and disease were spreading and Fujiwara no Tadamichi offered prayers for the peace of ordinary people. When the season comes round, shops in Nara put out fried tofu already cut into three or four centimeter squares, which is the size this dish wants and no other dish asks for. It is served in school lunches now as well.