Trace it back far enough and you arrive at funoyaki, a tea sweet served at a gathering hosted by Sen no Rikyu in the Azuchi-Momoyama period. Batter poured onto a hot surface. That is the whole of the ancestral connection, and it is enough to be going on with.

By the end of the Edo period, cooking loosened wheat flour on a sheet of hot iron had become a perfectly ordinary thing to do. In the late Meiji era a version appeared using imported flour, cabbage, and sauce, called yoshoku-yaki, western-style grilled. In the Kansai region it acquired a better name: issen yoshoku, one-sen western food, because the sauce made it foreign and the price made it accessible.

The modern form is a batter loosened with dashi and thickened with grated yamaimo, mixed through with finely cut cabbage and with pork or squid, cooked flat on a griddle and turned over exactly once.

It became nationally famous as an Osaka specialty only in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when chain restaurants began selling it around the country under exactly that description. So the line runs from a sixteenth-century tea ceremony to a franchise sign, unbroken, and every step of it is somebody putting flour on hot metal.