El Salvador.

Corn is not one ingredient here but a whole system. Dried kernels are cooked with lime into nixtamal, ground into masa, and then sent in several directions: pressed into tortillas, patted around fillings into pupusas, wrapped in banana leaf as tamales de elote or tamales pisques, thinned into atol, or fermented into chicha, the corn wine that turns up in the festival stew gallo en chicha. Fresh corn gets its own season and its own dishes — riguas, sweet corn tamales, elotes locos loaded with mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup and hard cheese. When Salvadorans abroad say they miss home food, masa is usually what they mean.

Beans run in parallel. The everyday bean is the frijol de seda, a small thin-skinned red bean prized because it cooks to a silky purée rather than staying mealy. Boiled beans become sopa de frijoles, blended and fried beans become frijoles licuados for spreading on tortillas, and day-old rice fried into the bean broth becomes casamiento, the breakfast plate whose name — "marriage" — is a joke about rice and beans finally settling down together. Alongside them come plantain, crema, fried egg and queso duroblando, the soft-firm cheese that also melts into pupusas.

The seasoning cupboard is modest and specific. Achiote gives colour and a faint peppery earthiness; relajo gives depth; oregano, thyme, bay and allspice do most of the aromatic work. Fresh herbs mean cilantro and, more importantly, culantro — the long serrated leaf with a far stronger scent, dropped whole into soups. Sourness comes from lime and from vinegar rather than from tamarind or tomatillo. Real chile heat is usually optional and served on the side, which is why visitors expecting Mexican-level spice are always surprised.

Geography splits the table. The Pacific coast, from La Libertad down to the Gulf of Fonseca, eats seafood daily: mariscada thickened with cream, coctel de conchas made from black clams pulled out of the mangroves, whole fried fish with curtido. The volcanic western highlands around Santa Ana and Ahuachapán are coffee country, with a cooler, more vegetable-driven table. The east, around San Miguel and Usulután, is cattle and dairy territory and the home ground of long-simmered offal soups.

Meals are structured around a plate rather than courses. Breakfast is the biggest fixed ritual — casamiento, fried plantain, crema, cheese, egg and tortillas — while lunch is the main meal and dinner is often pupusas from a neighbourhood pupusería that only opens in the evening. The comedor, an informal eating house serving one or two dishes of the day, is where most working people eat, and the food there is the truest version of the cuisine: no menu, no garnish, just a plate, a bowl of broth and a stack of tortillas.