Salted salmon or herring is simmered for a long time with daikon and potato. In some districts the herring is the rice-bran-pickled kind rather than the salted one. The seasoning is salt, plus sake lees or a little soy sauce, and nothing else. The salt already in the fish does most of the work, which means the broth starts strong and gets stronger.

It is regularly confused with ishikari nabe and it is a different dish. That one uses fresh salmon and miso. This one uses preserved fish and no miso at all. Change the state of the fish and the whole construction of the soup changes with it, which is why the two are not variations on each other.

Nobody agrees on the name. One account has a lord of the Matsume domain eating it while out hunting, at the house of a fisherman called Saito Sanpei. Another says it comes from a type of deep dish. It appears under this name in a travel account written late in the Edo period, so the dish is at least two centuries old.

It is claimed most strongly by the Hiyama district on the Japan Sea side. The winter bowl of a coast that spent two hundred years making soup out of salted fish, because salted fish was what there was.