The skin stays on. Pork belly is usual, though skin-on leg is also used, and it is not removed at any stage, and that is the clearest difference from the braised pork of the mainland. Cooked long enough, the skin turns translucent and slightly sticky, and the whole block gives way under the side of a chopstick without anyone needing to reach for a knife.

What decides the flavour is awamori and black sugar. Soy sauce and ginger go in too, but those two are the ones that make it this dish rather than another. The spirit takes the smell off the pork; the unrefined sugar gives the sauce its weight and its darkness.

It began at the Ryukyu court. The dish was assembled to feed the Chinese envoys who came to invest each new king, and its ancestor is generally identified as dongpo pork. Even the name is Chinese in origin. The recipe, the technique and the word itself all arrived by sea, and then stayed put for several hundred years.

It also keeps. A pot of it will sit for a month. Court food made for visiting ambassadors turns out to have been, at the same time, something a household could make in quantity and eat through the weeks that followed.