Bulgaria.

Start with the dairy, because everything else leans on it. Bulgarian yoghurt is fermented with Lactobacillus bulgaricus, a strain isolated here in the early twentieth century, and it is thicker and sharper than the set yoghurt sold in most supermarkets. Households buy it in tubs and use it structurally: as the acid in banitsa filling, as the base of tarator, as the cooling spoonful on top of stuffed vine leaves, and as ayran — yoghurt, water, salt — which is drunk with grilled meat the way beer is elsewhere. Sirene, made from cow or sheep milk and kept in brine, is the second pillar. It is grated in blizzards over shopska salata, cubed into pastry, whipped with egg to stuff peppers, and baked in a clay dish under tomato and chilli as sirene po shopski.

The herb shelf is short and used hard. Chubritsa (summer savory) is the national seasoning, sold both as loose leaf and as sharena sol, the "coloured salt" blend of savory, paprika and often ground fenugreek or corn flour that sits on every table next to the bread. Sweet red paprika colours the fats. Dried mint goes into bean soup and into the final fry-off of hot fat that gets poured over the pot. Dill belongs to cucumber and yoghurt, parsley to everything else, and cumin — unusual for the region — is the fingerprint of Bulgarian minced meat, the thing that separates a kyufte from a Serbian pljeskavica.

The defining vessel is earthenware. Gyuvech names both a wide glazed clay dish and the vegetable-and-meat casserole baked in it; gyuveche is the single-portion version that arrives at the table still spitting. Clay holds heat gently and unevenly in a way that suits Bulgarian technique, which is largely about leaving things alone: layers go in raw, the dish goes into a moderate oven, and nothing is stirred until it comes out. Alongside that sits the zadushvane method — a slow, lidded braise in fat and a little liquid, used for kavarma and for most vegetable dishes.

Meals are structured around salad first, and the salad is not an afterthought. Shopska, snezhanka (strained yoghurt with cucumber), roasted-pepper salads and lyutenitsa — the thick pepper-and-tomato relish canned by the crateful every September — open the table and accompany rakia, the fruit brandy that starts most long meals. Soup is a genuine course rather than a starter, from cold tarator in August to shkembe chorba, the vinegary tripe soup eaten at dawn. Bread is present at every meal, and in villages it is still often round rather than sliced.

Regional differences are real but softer than in neighbouring countries. The Rhodope mountains in the south cook with sheep dairy, potatoes and the smoky katak and patatnik of high pasture; the Black Sea coast eats fried small fish, mussels and rice pilafs with a Greek and Turkish accent; the Danube plain in the north leans on wheat, pork and river carp; and the Shopluk region around Sofia gave the country both its most famous salad and a reputation for eating with plenty of raw onion and garlic. Ottoman rule left the pastry, the stuffed vegetables and the coffee; the Orthodox fasting calendar left an enormous repertoire of vegan cooking that Bulgarians call postno rather than vegan, and which still shapes what appears on the table for weeks at a time.