Nerori, from the Winter Print Collection (Fuyu no Hangashū)

This 1939 colour woodblock print depicts "Nerori" (ねろり) — a local Akita preparation of glutinous rice cooked and worked in a particular winter style — and is one of the five sheets of Katsuhira Tokushi's Fuyu no hangashū ("Winter Print Collection") of 1939, a small-format folio devoted to the heating, cooking, and seasonal-food customs of the Akita winter. The composition treats the cooking and serving of the nerori dish as both a culinary and a documentary subject, recording with characteristic precision the textures and rituals of a regional foodway that has now largely disappeared from contemporary Akita kitchens. Produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement, the Nerori print is among the most ethnographically valuable single images in Katsuhira's mid-career output and one of the principal surviving graphic records of the regional cuisine of pre-war Akita.