In Kagawa, udon is not only something you go out to eat. It is part of the ordinary furniture of the day. Shops open early enough that people stop on the way to work, standing at a counter with a bowl before eight in the morning, and nobody treats this as remarkable.

The dough is flour, salt and water, and nothing else. It is kneaded underfoot, rested, and cut. Boiled and then shocked in cold water, the noodle keeps a squared edge that you feel against the teeth, and the local word for this, koshi, is used with the precision other places reserve for wine. Kake, bukkake, kamaage, shoyu: the same noodle becomes four different dishes depending only on how the broth is handled, or whether there is any broth at all.

The province has more than seven hundred udon shops. In some of them you boil your own noodles in a basket and pour your own stock from a tap on the wall. The line between the person cooking and the person eating is unusually thin here, and so is the bill. A few hundred yen is enough, which matters more than it sounds, because the meal never takes on the ceremony of tourism.

It behaves like something cooked for staff rather than for guests. You will see people leave one shop and walk straight towards the next.