The land is steep and the winters are long, and rice has never grown easily here. What grew instead was wheat and buckwheat, so the flour of those went into a thin skin and something else went inside it: pickled nozawana greens, aubergine, okara, mushrooms, pumpkin, dried strips of daikon.

The old way of cooking them was slow. The surface was dried briefly on an earthenware plate, and then the whole parcel was buried in the hot ash of the hearth and left to steam inside its own crust. The skin firms up, the greens let go of their liquid, and the thing cooks in the remains of a fire that had been lit for warmth anyway.

Now some places fry them on a griddle and others, in Nagano city especially, steam them in a basket. The name stays the same while the object does not: one has a crust you have to bite through, the other is soft the whole way to the centre. People are loyal to whichever version they grew up beside.

The fillings vary in the same manner. Sweet ones exist, red bean and pumpkin, and some districts once put salted saury or sardine inside them. The rule, if there is one, is that anything the season has produced can be wrapped in flour and put near a fire. That is less a recipe than a way of getting through a winter.