Bocchan Dango

Soseki taught in Matsuyama in 1895 and drew on the year for Botchan, published in 1906, in which the brash young teacher slips off to a dumpling shop near the hot spring. The shop long identified with that passage is Tsuboya Kashiho, said to date to the Meiji era, which originally sold a plain hot-spring dumpling. The familiar three-color skewer is credited to Noda Utaro, who is recorded as devising it in 1921, in the Taisho era, and the sweet took its literary nickname from there. Bound up with both the novel and Dogo Onsen, it has been Matsuyama's emblematic souvenir ever since.

Each ball is small and yielding, the gyuhi mochi soft and faintly elastic, pulling just slightly as you bite. The three coatings read distinctly: matcha brings a grassy, gently bitter edge against the sweetness, the egg an is rich and custard-like with a mild yolk warmth, and the azuki is the deepest and most familiar, earthy and roundly sweet. None is cloying; the bean and tea notes keep the sugar in check. Eaten in three bites off the skewer, it is tidy, tender, and quietly elegant — a teahouse sweet meant to sit beside green tea.

The dumpling is gyuhi: glutinous rice flour cooked with sugar and water until the starch fully gelatinizes into a translucent, stretchy mass that, thanks to the sugar holding moisture, stays soft long after cooking rather than hardening as plain dango does. The three an are made by cooking sweet beans or paste with sugar — azuki simmered and sweetened, matcha an tinted and flavored with green tea powder, and egg an enriched with yolk for color and a custard note. Each warm an is wrapped around its little gyuhi core so it clings as a thin even jacket; the skewer simply lines the three up. Because gyuhi resists staling, the sweet keeps and travels far better than an ordinary rice-flour dango — one reason it works so well as a souvenir.