Bangladesh.

Rice is not a side dish here, it is the meal, and Bangladeshis distinguish between rices the way other cuisines distinguish between wines. Everyday parboiled rice is coarse, cheap and made to soak up gravy. Kalijira and chinigura — tiny, intensely aromatic short grains — are reserved for polao, biryani and milk puddings, and cooks will insist that no basmati substitute smells the same. Beyond the plate of rice there is muri (puffed rice) sold by the bag for snacking, chira (flattened rice) soaked in milk for breakfast, and panta bhat, yesterday's rice left overnight under water to sour gently, which is both village survival food and the ceremonial dish of Pohela Boishakh, the Bengali New Year.

Fish outranks meat. Ilish, the hilsa, is the national fish and the object of a genuine seasonal obsession — bony, oily, and prized enough that a single good specimen can cost a day's wages during the monsoon run. Rui, katla, pabda, chingri (prawns) and tiny puti fish fill in the rest of the week, and along the coast shutki — sun-dried fish — is pounded into fierce, pungent relishes that split opinion even among Bangladeshis. The classic treatments are few and precise: bhapa (steamed in a mustard paste), jhol (a thin, clear-tasting gravy), jhal (a hotter, tighter one), and paturi (wrapped in banana leaf).

The defining technique in the meat kitchen is bhuna. It is not a sauce and not a spice mix, despite what restaurant menus abroad suggest — it is the act of frying meat and masala together over a long, patient heat until every drop of added water has gone and the oil separates out and coats the meat in a dark, glossy film. Beef bhuna, mutton bhuna and even bhuna khichuri all take their name from that same evaporating stage. Because most of the country is Muslim, beef and mutton are the celebration meats, and Eid al-Adha turns them into a national cooking event.

Mustard runs through everything: mustard oil as the default cooking fat and finishing condiment, black and yellow mustard seed ground with green chile into the paste that defines bhapa dishes, and panch phoron — the five-seed blend of cumin, fenugreek, nigella, fennel and mustard or radhuni — dropped whole into hot fat to open a dish. Sourness comes from tamarind, lime, green mango and, in Sylhet, from shatkora, a thick-skinned bitter citrus used for its peel rather than its juice.

Regional differences are real. Dhaka's old city cooks a rich Mughal-descended repertoire — kacchi biryani, morog polao, glazed kababs, bakarkhani bread — that has little to do with village food. Sylhet cooks with shatkora and satkora-scented beef and exports both its people and its restaurant tradition to Britain. Chattogram, on the Bay of Bengal, is the hottest and most seafood-driven kitchen in the country, home of mezban beef. And across the north and the rice belt, the daily meal is quieter than any of these: rice, dal, a fried vegetable, one fish, and chile on the side.