🍱 Shimotsukare
It is one of the representative local dishes of Tochigi Prefecture. It is a dish filled with the wisdom of our ancestors, using leftover salted salmon heads from the New Year and soybeans left over from roasted lucky beans on Setsubun. In the past, this dish was made as an offering to the Inari shrine on the first horse day of the second lunar month, and there was a taboo against making it outside of that time. The time of Hatsuuma was the peak season for vegetables, and it was difficult to procure foodstuffs. Mishitsuke, made from leftovers, was not originally suitable as an offering to the gods. Therefore, it is thought that the food was sublimated into an offering to the Inari shrine by making it an "oddity," an offering to the gods, instead of being made normally. The ingredients vary from region to region. In the central part of Tochigi Prefecture and the lower reaches of the Kinugawa River in Ibaraki Prefecture, the basic ingredients are radish, soybeans, salted salmon head, sake lees, carrots, and deep-fried tofu. In the eastern part of Saitama Prefecture, northern part of Chiba Prefecture, southern part of Fukushima Prefecture, and Tajima, only radish and soybeans are used, but there are also combinations of radish, soybeans, and salted salmon head, or radish, soybeans, salted salmon head, and sakekasu. Sakekasu is said to have come into use around the middle of the Edo period, when sake breweries began to appear and sakekasu became widely distributed.