A film of fat sits across the surface of the bowl. Lift it and the rim is too hot to hold for long, which is exactly the intention. Lard was floated on the soup to keep the heat in, a solution invented after the war by a man running a shop in a city where a bowl of noodles goes cold in minutes.

Miso entered the story around 1955, when one shop in Sapporo tried it, and reached the printed menu in 1963. As culinary history goes this is recent, more recent than most people assume when they meet a dish that feels this settled. It spread across the country within a decade, helped along by magazines, by a bag of instant noodles carrying the city's name, and by a chain that opened branches everywhere from 1967.

The noodle is yellow, thick, curled, and holds a lot of water. Minced pork goes on rather than sliced roast pork, along with onion, bean sprouts and cabbage, all fried hard in a pan before the soup goes over them. The mince makes sense once you see the wok: it belongs to the stir-fry, not to the broth, and it arrives in the bowl already cooked with the vegetables rather than laid on afterwards.

It stays hot to the last mouthful. In Sapporo in February, that is not a small thing.