Indonesia.

Rice is the axis everything else turns around. In Indonesian, a meal without rice barely counts as a meal — the word for eating, makan nasi, literally folds rice into it — and the day's cooking is organized as rice plus lauk-pauk, an orbit of side dishes: something fried, something braised, something fresh, and always sambal. Leftover rice is never waste; dried out overnight, it becomes the perfect raw material for nasi goreng the next morning.

Flavor is built from bumbu — spice pastes ground fresh in a stone mortar (cobek and ulekan) from shallots, garlic, chiles, candlenuts, turmeric, galangal, ginger and lemongrass. The paste is fried gently in oil until it darkens and the raw smell cooks off, a step called menumis that is the true foundation technique of the cuisine. Onto that base go the archipelago's signature seasonings: terasi, a pungent fermented shrimp paste used in tiny amounts for deep savoriness; kecap manis for sweetness and color; tamarind and lime for sourness; and coconut milk, which carries the great slow braises like rendang.

Sambal deserves its own paragraph, because it is less a condiment than a birthright. Every region, warung and grandmother has a version — sambal ulek, sambal terasi, sambal matah from Bali, sambal dabu-dabu from Manado — and a meal is judged as much by its sambal as by its main dish. Heat levels are personal and non-negotiable.

The Maluku islands, the original Spice Islands, were the world's only source of nutmeg and cloves until the eighteenth century, which is why Portuguese, Dutch and English ships fought over them for two hundred years. The Dutch colonial period that followed left its own table culture — most famously the rijsttafel, a banquet format of dozens of small Indonesian dishes served at once — while Chinese settlers contributed noodles, soy sauce, the wok and stir-frying, all long since naturalized.

Street food is where the cuisine lives most publicly. Kaki lima carts and warung stalls sell sate grilled over coconut-shell charcoal, bakso meatball soup, martabak, and nasi goreng fried to order over roaring flame late into the night. In 2018 the national tourism ministry named five official national dishes — soto, rendang, sate, nasi goreng and gado-gado — a diplomatic answer to an impossible question, since a country this large could justify fifty.