The name is a description of the method and nothing more: to simmer and to dress, niru and aeru, run together into niai. Nobody has proposed anything more elaborate.

Lotus root cut into half-moons, carrot and burdock in matchsticks, fried tofu, all of it fried off first. Once it has softened, stock and soy sauce go in, and then — last, after everything else — vinegar is poured around the pan and the whole thing is simmered again. The vinegar arriving at the end rather than the beginning is what makes it this dish and not another one.

The lotus root and the burdock are both grown in this prefecture in quantity. It is a root-vegetable dish from root-vegetable country, and it belongs specifically to the Shimoichi district, east of the centre of Mito, where it is said to go back a long way.

It was indispensable at new year and at celebrations. It also appeared at the koyasu-ko, the monthly gathering on the nineteenth to pray for safe childbirth, as the food put in front of the people who came. You cannot buy it. It is not in the shops and nobody makes it commercially. A dish that exists only inside houses, cooked in a large bowl on the days when a lot of people are in one.