Sardines come ashore at Kujukuri in enormous quantities. They also spoil almost immediately. Almost every dish on this stretch of coast is, in one way or another, an answer to those two facts at once, and this is one of the older answers to them.

Fresh fish are gutted and beheaded and washed under running water, then packed in salt. After that, toasted sesame and red chili go in, and the whole thing sits for some hours. Two or three days later the vinegar has done its work and it is ready to eat.

Winter is the season, when the fish are at their best, and that is when it gets made in quantity along this shore. It turns up as an everyday side dish, as something to drink over in the evening, and on the table at local observances, which is a remarkably wide range of duty for a preparation that began its life purely as a storage problem.

What strikes me is the direction of the preparation. Most fish cookery starts with what you want to eat. This starts with a boat arriving with more fish than anyone can possibly deal with, and works backward. A fish that famously will not keep has ended up giving its name to a preparation that does, which is the joke at the center of it.