Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The pastry tradition comes first, because in Bosnia it is a daily habit rather than a special occasion. Jufka — dough stretched by hand across a floured table until you can read newsprint through it — is rolled around a filling, coiled into a spiral and baked in a round metal pan called a tepsija. The family of pies is collectively called pita, and each filling gets its own name: burek with minced beef, sirnica with cheese, zeljanica with greens and curd, krompiruša with potato, tikvenjača with squash. This matters for one famous argument: in Bosnia, burek means meat, full stop. Ordering "cheese burek" in Sarajevo gets you corrected on the spot, while in Serbia and Croatia the word is used loosely for any pita — one of the friendliest running disputes in the region.

The second pillar is slow, undisturbed cooking. Bosanski lonac is the emblem: a tall earthenware pot filled in layers with chunks of beef and lamb, cabbage, potato, carrot and whole heads of garlic, sealed with a lid or a sheet of dough and left for hours over low heat while cooks are explicitly told not to stir it. The same restraint shows up in dolme and sarme — vegetables hollowed or leaves rolled around minced meat and rice, packed tightly upright in a pot so they hold their shape, then simmered slowly under a plate. Sogan-dolma, whole onions separated into shells and stuffed, is the Sarajevo version that no neighbouring country makes in quite the same way.

Soup is a course in its own right and almost always thickened. Begova čorba — the "bey's soup" of chicken, veal, okra and root vegetables, finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison — is the aristocratic end of a family of čorbe that reach down to everyday flour-and-fat soups. A thin dry-roux (zaprška) of flour cooked in fat is the standard Bosnian thickener, borrowed from the Austro-Hungarian half of the country's history and used with a lighter hand than in Vienna.

Dairy is where Bosnia and its neighbours agree completely. Kajmak, skimmed from boiled milk and matured until it turns from cream into something closer to a soft cheese, is spread on bread, melted over ćevapi and eaten with fried dough for breakfast. Young curd cheese goes into pies; thick sour cream is poured over potato dishes; drinkable yoghurt is the default partner for anything baked in a tepsija.

Sweets are unmistakably Ottoman: pastries drenched in cold syrup after baking (hurmašice, baklava, tufahije in their sugar bath), heavy on walnuts, semolina and butter, and served with the small copper-pot coffee — bosanska kafa — that is closer to Turkish coffee than to anything Western. Coffee is not a drink here so much as a unit of time; the word ćeif, meaning unhurried pleasure taken properly, is applied to it more than to anything else.