The meat is picked off a boiled shark's head by hand, and while it is still hot it gets dressed with vinegared miso and grated daikon, or else with cabbage. Nothing is allowed to cool first.

The name explains the method. Sukume comes from su de tsutsumu, to wrap in vinegar, and in Tsugaru it is pronounced sugume.

People have been eating shark here for a very long time. Excavations of Jomon period sites in Tsugaru show shark among what was eaten, which puts this food several thousand years deep in the same ground. Aburatsunozame, the spiny dogfish, accounts for well over ninety percent of all the shark landed in the prefecture, and fillets and whole heads are still perfectly normal things to see sitting out on a fishmonger's slab there today.

Because vinegar preserves, this kept right through the winter without any other intervention, and that reliability is what made it essential at new year and at weddings. What tells you where this dish actually came from is the specification of the head. Nobody sets out to cook a head unless the alternative is throwing the thing away, and in Tsugaru that alternative was never seriously on the table.