The process of making mochi — mochitsuki — is as much ritual as technique. Traditionally, cooked glutinous rice is placed in a large stone or wooden mortar called an usu and pounded with a heavy wooden mallet called a kine, with one person striking rhythmically while another turns and folds the mass between blows. The timing has to be exact. The result after sufficient pounding is a cohesive, glossy dough that bears almost no resemblance to the rice it started as. Mochitsuki is traditionally performed at the New Year, often communally, and the making of the mochi is inseparable from the occasion itself.

New Year is where mochi’s deepest roots sit. Kagami mochi — two round mochi cakes stacked and displayed as a ritual offering — has been part of Japanese New Year observance for centuries, representing the old year and the new, and the mirror it is said to resemble. Ozoni, a soup containing mochi, is eaten on New Year’s morning across Japan, with regional variations in broth, accompaniments, and mochi shape that function as a kind of culinary map of the country. In the Kansai region the broth is white miso and the mochi is round; in Kanto it is clear broth and the mochi is square. These are not minor variations — people have strong feelings about them.

The history of mochi in Japan goes back at least to the Heian period, roughly the 8th to 12th centuries, where it appears in court records as a ceremonial food associated with longevity and good fortune. The pounding of rice into mochi was understood to release a spiritual force — a belief that elevated it above ordinary food and embedded it in religious and seasonal observance in ways that persist. Mochi offered to the gods at Shinto shrines, mochi distributed at festivals, mochi eaten at specific moments in the calendar — the food and the ritual became inseparable over a long enough period that it is now difficult to discuss one without the other.

Outside Japan, mochi’s profile expanded significantly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, largely through mochi ice cream — a ball of ice cream wrapped in a thin layer of mochi dough, developed and commercialized in the 1990s. It is a good product. It is also a significant departure from what mochi actually is, in the same way that a fortune cookie is a significant departure from what a cookie actually is — functional, popular, and somewhat beside the point. The ice cream version introduced mochi’s texture to people who had never encountered it, which is not nothing, but the form strips away most of the context.

What remains, underneath the ice cream and the Instagram-friendly daifuku and the novelty flavors, is a food with a longer and more serious history than its current global popularity might suggest — a pounded rice cake that has been present at Japanese births, deaths, weddings, and new years for over a thousand years, and that still carries that weight for the people who grew up eating it.