Ethiopia.

Start with the grain. Teff is a tiny highland cereal grown mostly in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and its flour ferments into the batter that becomes injera. The batter sours for two to three days, powered by a saved liquid starter called ersho, then goes onto a wide clay griddle, the mitad, poured in a spiral from the rim inwards. It cooks on one side only, and steam pushing up through the fermented batter leaves the surface covered in small craters — the "eyes" that tell a cook the sheet is right. The result is soft, tangy and slightly rubbery, and its sourness is not incidental: it is the acid that balances the fat and chilli of everything served on top.

The stews divide into two families. Key wat is the red kind, where berbere is fried into onions until the mixture darkens and the fat rises to the surface — doro wat and misir wat both belong here. Alicha is the yellow kind, where turmeric, ginger and slit green chillies do the work and the finished stew tastes gentler and more aromatic. Both start the same way, with a mountain of finely chopped onion cooked down in a dry pan before any fat goes in, which is the single most characteristic move in the whole cuisine. That dry stage collapses the onions into a sweet paste and is why an Ethiopian stew tastes thick without any flour, cream or stock.

Fasting is the other structural force. Wednesdays and Fridays, the fifty-five days of Lent, and several other periods in the Orthodox Tewahedo calendar exclude meat, dairy and eggs entirely, which is why the everyday plate in much of the country is beyaynetu: a circle of small vegan stews — shiro, misir wat, gomen, cabbage and potato alicha, split peas, beetroot — spooned around one sheet of injera. Restaurants build their whole weekday trade on it, and a fasting plate is never treated as the lesser option.

Regional variation runs deeper than the injera-and-wat picture suggests. The Gurage people of the south build their kitchen on enset, the false banana whose fermented pulp becomes kocho, a dense bread eaten with kitfo and fresh cheese. Tigray, sharing a border and much of its cooking with Eritrea, makes tihlo — roasted barley dough rolled into balls and dipped into stew with a wooden spear. Harar and the Muslim east lean on trade-route spicing and pastry, while the Afar and Somali lowlands are pastoralist, with camel and goat milk, rice and meat rather than teff. Pasta appears everywhere, a genuine leftover of the brief Italian occupation of the late 1930s.

Drinks close the circle. Ethiopia is the botanical home of Coffea arabica, and coffee is prepared as a ceremony rather than a beverage: green beans roasted in the room, ground by hand, brewed in a clay jebena and poured in three successive rounds. Alongside it are the fermented drinks — tella, a cloudy home-brewed barley or sorghum beer, and tej, honey wine bittered with gesho twigs and served in a round-bottomed glass flask.