Armenia.

Wheat is the spine of the cuisine, and it appears in more forms here than almost anywhere. Whole grains are hulled and cracked into dzavar and bulgur, boiled into porridges, folded into soups, and pounded with meat until the two become inseparable. Lavash — rolled paper-thin, slapped onto the wall of a tonir and baked in under a minute — is stacked, dried, and revived with a sprinkle of water months later. The same dough logic runs through the stuffed breads of the highlands and the layered pastries of the sweet table. When Armenians talk about a table being properly set, they mean bread first.

The second pillar is soured dairy. Matsun, the local cultured milk, is thicker and sharper than most commercial yogurt and does triple duty: eaten plain with bread, whisked into cold drinks, and cooked into hot soups where its acidity has to be tamed with egg and flour so it does not curdle. Strained matsun becomes a soft cheese; the whey is not thrown away. Alongside it sit the brined cheeses of the villages — chechil pulled into strings, lori and chanakh salted in barrels — that anchor a breakfast plate next to herbs, tomato and lavash.

Herbs are used at a scale that surprises visitors. A bunch of parsley, coriander, dill, tarragon, basil or purple reyhan is not a garnish but a component measured in handfuls; the flatbreads of Artsakh are stuffed with a dozen wild greens at once, and no spring table is complete without a plate of raw herbs to tear into every mouthful. In the mountains, foraged greens — sorrel, mallow, wild chervil, the shoots called sibekh — extend the range far past what a market sells.

Meat cooking splits into two traditions. One is fast and open-fire: khorovats, chunks of lamb or pork threaded on flat skewers and grilled over vine cuttings, with vegetables charred beside them until their skins blister off. The other is slow and enclosed: lamb and rice packed into leaves and vegetables for tolma, dumplings baked and then drowned in broth, whole pumpkins filled with dried fruit and baked until collapsing. Fruit crosses freely into savoury dishes — dried apricot, prune, sour cherry and pomegranate turn up in rice, in stews and beside grilled meat without anyone calling it fusion.

Regional differences are real and still argued about. Eastern Armenian cooking, centred on Yerevan and the Ararat valley, leans on fresh vegetables, grilled meat and abundant fruit. Western Armenian cooking, carried out of Anatolia by survivors of the genocide and now rooted in Beirut, Aleppo, Los Angeles and Marseille, brought bulgur, pepper paste, tahini and a lighter, more Levantine hand — dishes like eetch and lahmajo belong to that lineage. Artsakh contributes the wild-herb repertoire, and Javakhk and the northern highlands the heavy dairy-and-potato food of cold places.