Marusei Butter Sandwich (マルセイバターサンド)

Two pale, flat biscuits baked with a flour Rokkatei keeps for its own use hold a thick layer of cream made from butter from Hokkaido raw milk, white chocolate, and raisins described as rum-soaked. The biscuit is short and sweet, close to shortbread, and it is thin enough that the cream makes up most of the weight in the hand. The white chocolate gives that cream a milky roundness that plain whipped butter lacks, so the first thing the mouth registers is dairy, and the rum comes later as a low warmth behind the fruit.

It is sold and eaten cold. Straight from the chiller the cream is stiff enough to hold a clean edge, and the biscuit gives with a quiet crumble. Then the cream warms against the tongue and softens to something near spreadable butter, and the raisins show up as small, chewy, sour-sweet pockets in the smooth middle. Left on a warm table the cream slumps and slides out the sides, and the biscuit slowly takes up moisture from it and goes soft. A fresh box is good for about nine to ten days from production.

That short clock shapes who buys it and where. Rokkatei sells it in its own shops in Obihiro and Sapporo, at airports and department stores, by mail order, and by the single piece over the counter as well as in boxes. A box is the gift a traveler carries home for the office, handed over within a few days of the trip and opened at someone's desk with tea. Because the box has to be eaten within days, the buyer picks the date of the gift to match the date of the trip.

A frozen mail-order version keeps for about 23 days. Thawed in the refrigerator and then left a few days in a cool room, it changes in the mouth: the biscuit, which is firm and crumbly straight from the thaw, turns tender as it draws moisture from the cream, and the cream loses some of its chill-set stiffness until the two layers eat as one soft piece.

The paper wrapper carries a circle holding the character 成, with バ on one side and タ on the other, copied from a butter label of the Meiji era. It is a pioneer's trade mark printed on a confection, and it sits flat against the biscuit and the circle and its three characters are the only picture on the pack. The label belonged to the butter that Banseisha, a pioneer group on the Tokachi plain, sold under the trade name Marusei Bata, and the sandwich takes its name from that tin of butter.

Obihiro, 1977

Rokkatei began in 1933 in Obihiro, in eastern Hokkaido, as a branch of a Sapporo confectioner, and for its first decades it traded as Obihiro Chiaki-an (帯広千秋庵). In 1977 the company took the name Rokkatei, and the Marusei Butter Sandwich was released to mark the change. Sources do not say who in the kitchen worked out the recipe.

The name came from the town's own history. Yoda Benzo (1853 to 1925) led Banseisha, a pioneer group that settled the Tokachi plain in the Meiji era and made a butter sold under the trade name Marusei Bata. The 成 in the circle comes from that butter's label and from the name Banseisha (晩成社), and Rokkatei printed the old label on its wrapper instead of designing a new emblem.

The first product the renamed shop put on its counter in 1977 therefore carried the mark of a Tokachi settlement's butter, a brand sold decades earlier by Yoda's settlers. The label has been on the pack since that first release in 1977.