The head of the salted salmon eaten at New Year is still there. So are the soybeans thrown at the Setsubun festival in early February. Those go into a pot with daikon and carrot grated on a coarse wooden grater called an oni-oroshi, with fried tofu and sake lees, and are cooked for a long time. The result does not look appetising, and nobody in Tochigi pretends otherwise. A number of people stop at that point and never get to the taste.

It was made on the first day of the horse in the second month of the old calendar, as an offering to the Inari shrine. That is the lean season, between one year's vegetables and the next, when there was nothing much to offer. So the leftovers were cooked into something and offered anyway, and the offering of a made-over thing became the point rather than an embarrassment.

There is a saying that if you eat shimotsukare from seven houses you will not fall ill. In some districts it is still carried around the neighbourhood in tiered boxes and swapped.

Every household makes it differently, so seven houses means seven versions. The sharing is not an add-on to the dish. It is the shape of the dish, and it is the reason anyone can say what seven versions of it taste like.