These noodles are hard. Thick, close to square in section, and firm in a way that increases as you chew toward the middle, where the resistance is greatest. People make jokes about their jaws afterwards, and the jokes are not entirely jokes.

On top go boiled cabbage, fried tofu, and horse meat simmered until it is sweet and dark. The broth might be soy sauce, might be miso, might be a mixture of the two; it varies from shop to shop and from household to household, and there is no version anyone considers authoritative.

On the table there is a pot of suridane, a paste of red chilli ground with sesame and sansho pepper and then fried in oil. That also varies by shop, which is one reason people here have a shop rather than shops.

The ground here is volcanic and will not grow rice, so this was barley and wheat country, and people ate their grain as flour. The women worked the looms. The account handed down is that the men took over the midday cooking so that the weaving would not stop, and so that the weavers' hands would not be roughened by the work. Whether or not that is the whole story, a noodle that holds up while it waits, and can be eaten quickly with one hand, is a reasonable thing for such a household to have arrived at. The hardness stopped being a compromise and became the thing people come for.