This is a dish for a wedding table, and it starts with a decision that has nothing to do with cooking. The sea bream is opened along the back, not the belly. Cutting the belly open would suggest ritual disembowelment, which is not the association you want at a wedding, so the knife goes in from the other side. A samurai anxiety survives here as a technique for handling fish.

The cavity is filled with okara — the pulp left over from making tofu — stir-fried first with carrot, burdock, lotus root, shiitake, ginkgo nuts and wood ear. Then the whole fish is steamed. Forty to fifty minutes for an ordinary one, an hour and a half or more for a large one, and it cannot be hurried.

At a wedding two of them are laid out belly to belly, facing each other. The arrangement has its own names, the staring bream or the crane-and-tortoise bream, and getting the pair to face correctly is part of the dish rather than a decoration added to it.

So the most auspicious fish in the country is stuffed with the cheapest thing in the kitchen: sea bream and the residue left after somebody pressed soy milk. The extravagant object and the leftover sit on the same plate, and the household serving it would have been unable to afford the first without the second.