Iran.

The backbone of the Iranian table is the khoresh, a slow stew ladled over rice rather than served as a bowl of its own. The method barely changes from dish to dish: onions chopped fine and fried in oil with turmeric until they are properly golden, meat turned in that same pan until it loses its raw colour, then water, a lid, and hours of low heat. What makes each khoresh different is the souring agent added along the way — dried limes for ghormeh sabzi, pomegranate molasses for fesenjan, split peas and lime for gheimeh, unripe grapes or verjuice for others. The stew is judged finished not by a timer but by the layer of coloured oil that rises to the surface, which cooks call the sign that the ingredients have stopped being separate things.

Rice deserves its own paragraph because Iranians treat it as a craft. Long-grain rice is rinsed until the water runs clear, often soaked in salted water for hours, then boiled hard in plenty of water for only a few minutes and drained the moment the grains bend but still snap in the middle. The pot is then rebuilt: fat in the bottom, a crust layer of plain rice, potato slices or flatbread, the parboiled rice mounded over it in a pyramid, holes poked through for steam, and a cloth-wrapped lid clamped on for forty minutes of gentle steaming. Plain steamed rice is chelo; rice layered or cooked with something else — lentils, sour cherries, dill and broad beans, herbs — is polow. The crust that forms underneath is tahdig, and its quality is how a cook is quietly judged.

The herb habit runs through everything. Sabzi means both greens and the enormous bunches of parsley, coriander, dill, chives, tarragon and mint sold in every market, and Persian recipes use them in quantities that alarm cooks from other traditions. They go into stews, into kuku frittatas where herbs outnumber egg several times over, into aash soups thick enough to stand a spoon in, and onto the table raw as sabzi khordan, the plate of herbs, radish, walnut and feta that sits beside almost every meal.

The other half of the cuisine is fire. Kababs — minced koobideh, lamb fillet barg, saffron-yogurt chicken joojeh — are grilled over charcoal on flat swords and served with saffron-buttered rice and a blistered tomato, usually from a kababi rather than made at home. Bread does the same job in the morning: sangak baked on hot pebbles, barbari, lavash, torn and eaten with feta, walnuts and hot sweet tea.

Regional cooking splits sharply. The Caspian provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran are the garlic-and-sour belt, with smoked fish, walnut sauces, sour orange and charred aubergine. Azerbaijan in the northwest leans towards meatballs, dried fruit and dense soups. The Gulf south cooks with tamarind, fresh chile, fenugreek and fish, and tastes closer to the Indian Ocean than to Tehran. Meals themselves are structured around rice and a stew with everything else — yogurt, pickles, herbs, bread, salad — arriving at once, and dessert is usually fruit, tea and something small and rosewater-scented rather than a course.