Imo Mochi

Hokkaidō was Japan's frontier, and imo mochi is frontier food — an improvisation born of what the north could and couldn't grow. When the Meiji government began settling the island in earnest after 1869, it sent farmers into a land whose short, cold summers defeated the rice paddy that anchored Japanese cooking everywhere else. What thrived instead was the potato, promoted hard by the Kaitakushi, the colonial development bureau, as a hardy staple for a hard place. So the settlers did what cooks on any frontier do: they took the food of home — mochi, that chewy pounded-rice comfort — and rebuilt it out of the crop they actually had.

The trick is potato starch, katakuriko, which turns plain mashed potato into something with genuine pull and stretch. Fried in butter and lacquered with soy and mirin, the rounds land somewhere between a dumpling and a griddle cake: crisp-edged, chewy-centred, salty-sweet. The butter is the tell that this is Hokkaidō and nowhere else — the dairy island, where a knob of it goes on everything. It's peasant cleverness dressed up as a sweet, and it has outlived the hardship that invented it.