Gizzard, heart, liver, and kinkan — the immature eggs found inside a hen, still without shells, yellow and soft. All of it was thrown away once. Every part of this dish is offal that had no market.

A little soy sauce and sugar is brought to the boil, and the offal goes in. Deliberately little liquid: the point is to reduce it while turning the pieces through it, until the sauce goes glossy and thick like toffee and there is essentially nothing left in the pan but coating.

It was worked out around 1950 in a soba shop in Kofu, and the reasoning is recorded plainly enough. Chicken offal was being discarded, which seemed wasteful, and somebody wondered whether something cheap and good could be made from it instead.

In 2010 it won the national competition for regional dishes of this kind, which brought a good deal of attention. It is still a soba shop dish, which is the odd part — nothing about it has anything to do with buckwheat. A survey in 2008 found fifty-one soba shops around Kofu serving it, as a starter, as something to drink with, or spooned over rice as a bowl in its own right. The part of the bird nobody wanted is now what a great many of those shops are known for.