Algeria.

Learn the two sauces and most of the country opens up. The red one, marqa hamra, starts with onion softened in oil, then tomato paste fried until it darkens and smells sweet rather than metallic, then paprika, a scrape of chilli, garlic and meat, loosened with water and left alone. The white one, marqa beida, refuses colour entirely: grated onion goes into oil over low heat and must stay pale, and the seasoning comes from cinnamon, black pepper, sometimes a strand of saffron, with the sauce thickened by chickpeas and long simmering instead of browning. Cooks judge both by the same signal — the sauce is ready when a film of orange or clear fat rises at the edge of the pot and the liquid clings to the back of a spoon.

Semolina is the national flour. Coarse grades are rolled by hand into couscous, medium grades go into bread and the syrup-soaked cakes of Ramadan, and fine grades are worked into the elastic doughs that become mhadjeb, msemen and the tissue-thin dioul sheets used for bourek. Wheat also arrives green and smoked as frik, the cracked freekeh that gives chorba its body and its faintly burnt aroma. Rice appears, but as a guest; bread and semolina are the hosts.

The kitchen carries its history openly. Three centuries of Ottoman rule left dolma, bourek and a taste for cinnamon in meat dishes. Andalusian refugees who crossed after 1492 brought almonds, orange-blossom water and the pastry work that Tlemcen and Algiers still specialise in. Amazigh cooking, older than any of it, holds the line on couscous, barley, olive oil, wild greens and the clay tajine plate used for baking bread. French colonial rule left the baguette, the coffee habit and the flan, absorbed without much ceremony. Spanish influence lingers in the west, where Oran's karantika keeps a Spanish name.

A meal is usually one substantial dish rather than a sequence. Salads and small fried things may open it, the tajine or couscous arrives in a shared platter, and bread does the work of cutlery for anything with sauce. Fruit closes almost every ordinary meal; the elaborate pastries — kalb el louz, baklawa, makrout, griwech — belong to Ramadan, weddings and the two Eids, when trays of them are made in quantities that only make sense if you plan to give most of them away.

Regional lines are clear. Algiers cooks pale, Ottoman-inflected food and hand-cut rechta. Kabylia leans on olive oil, barley and greens. Constantine is famous for its pastry and its chorba, and the oases south of it produce the dates that sweeten everything. Oran and the west sit closest to Spain and Morocco and eat the most street food, sardines and chickpea flour included. The Sahara adds its own bread, taguella, baked directly in hot sand.