Iceland.

Lamb is the backbone. The Icelandic sheep is a single, closely guarded breed that has been on the island since the settlement, and the lambs spend their whole summer loose in the highlands eating wild grasses, thyme, moss campion and berries before the autumn round-up brings them down. That diet gives the meat a mild, faintly herbal taste with none of the heavy muttony edge people expect from sheep, which is why Icelanders roast a leg of it with almost nothing on it and let the gravy do the talking. Nothing is wasted either: the shanks and neck go into kjötsúpa, the legs are smoked into hangikjöt, and the parts most kitchens discard turn up at midwinter feasts as singed sheep's head, blood pudding and liver sausage.

Fish is the other half of the table, and Icelanders eat it the way inland countries eat chicken — casually, often, and without ceremony. Cod, haddock, wolffish, ocean perch and Arctic char dominate, and the standard home treatment is gentle poaching in salted water rather than frying or saucing. Two of the country's most-loved dishes, plokkfiskur and fiskibollur, exist specifically because a household ended up with more poached fish than it could eat at one sitting.

Preservation techniques still define the flavour vocabulary. Drying is the oldest: split fish hung in open slatted sheds where the cold Atlantic wind does the work, producing harðfiskur, a brittle protein snack eaten with butter. Smoking came next, and because Iceland has almost no forest, the traditional smoke came from birch scrub, driftwood and — genuinely, not as a novelty — dried sheep dung, which burns slow and cool and gives hangikjöt its particular sharp perfume. Souring in whey left over from skyr-making kept meat edible through winters without refrigeration; that sour food, þorramatur, is now eaten mostly at Þorri midwinter parties, more as heritage than as dinner.

Dairy runs through everything, and skyr is its centrepiece: skimmed milk cultured and set with rennet, then strained until it is thick enough to hold a spoon. It is technically a fresh cheese, not a yoghurt, and it has been made here since the settlement era. Butter is used with a heavy hand — on rye bread, on dried fish, melted over potatoes — and the plain white béchamel called uppstúfur is the standard sauce for boiled and smoked meat.

Bread is a late and slightly foreign arrival. Rye was imported grain, so it was treated as precious, sweetened with syrup and baked slowly into the dense dark rúgbrauð, sometimes steamed in the ground beside a hot spring where the geothermal heat holds a steady near-boiling temperature for a full day. Alongside that sits flatkaka, a thin rye flatbread scorched on a hot plate, eaten with butter and slices of smoked lamb. Geothermal heat now does daytime work too: greenhouses at Hveragerði and Flúðir grow tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs year-round, which is the main reason a modern Icelandic salad exists at all.