Israel.

Start with the vegetable table. Almost every restaurant meal opens with salatim — a scatter of small plates that arrive unasked: matbucha cooked down for hours, roasted aubergine with tahini, pickled turnips stained pink with beetroot, cabbage with lemon, shredded carrot with cumin, olives. They are not appetisers in the European sense but the frame of the meal, refilled while you eat, and they explain why Israeli cooking reads as vegetable-forward even when a lamb skewer is on the way.

Tahini is the structural ingredient. Raw sesame paste thinned with ice water, lemon and garlic turns pale and fluffy and becomes a sauce for everything — poured into pita over falafel, spooned over roast aubergine, whisked into soups, sweetened into halva and desserts. Learning that tahini seizes into cement before it loosens into cream is the first real technique a cook picks up here. Chickpeas run a close second: soaked, boiled soft for hummus, or ground raw for falafel, which is the whole difference between a good fritter and a dense one.

The spice map splits along migration lines. North African kitchens brought paprika, caraway, preserved lemon and harissa, and with them chraime and matbucha. Yemenite cooks brought hawaij, a warming blend of cumin, turmeric, black pepper and cardamom, plus the fiery green relish zhug and slow-baked breads like kubaneh and the crisp fried malawach. Iraqi families brought amba, the tart pickled mango sauce that ended up on half the country's sandwiches, plus rice cooked with meat and dried fruit. Ashkenazi kitchens from Central and Eastern Europe brought the braided challah, brined herring, chicken soup and the overnight stew cholent.

The religious calendar shapes technique more than any chef does. Kosher law separates meat from dairy, so a meat meal ends without cheese or cream and vegetable cooking gets more attention than in comparable Mediterranean cuisines. Because cooking is prohibited on the Sabbath, the great slow dishes exist: cholent among Ashkenazim, hamin and its Sephardi and Yemenite cousins, all built on Friday afternoon and left on a low flame or a hotplate until Saturday lunch, which is why they taste of eighteen hours rather than two. Holidays carry their own foods — honey and round challah for Rosh Hashanah, fried food for Hanukkah, unleavened cooking for Passover.

The street canon is short and very good: falafel and shawarma in pita or the wider laffa, sabich with its aubergine and brown egg, hummus eaten hot with a spoon in the morning at a dedicated hummusiya, and malabi under red syrup from a kiosk. Modern restaurant cooking in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem has pushed all of this further, with wood-fired vegetables, sourdough pita and a great deal of tahini in places it has never been, but the base has stayed the same: bread, salad, something grilled, something dipped.