Ivory Coast.

Cassava, plantain, yam and rice are the four pillars, and Ivorians eat all of them rather than picking one. Cassava is the most transformed of the group: grated, fermented, pressed and steamed, it becomes attiéké, a granular starch with a faint sourness that reads a little like couscous and a little like sourdough. Plantain is eaten at every stage of ripeness — green and starchy for pounding into foutou, streaked yellow-black and sweet for frying into alloco, fully collapsed and sugary for mashing into fritters. Yam is boiled or pounded, and rice, much of it imported, has become the everyday base in cities.

The sauces divide into thick and thin. Thick ones are built on a fat-rich pulp or paste: sauce graine from palm nuts boiled and pressed for their orange pulp, sauce arachide from groundnut paste let down with stock. Both are cooked well past the point of looking done, because the finishing signal is visual — the fat has to break and float in a clear orange film on the surface. Until that happens the sauce tastes raw and pasty. Thin sauces run the other way: sauce claire and okra-based sauces are kept loose and peppery on purpose, so they slide over a swallowed starch rather than clinging to it.

Depth comes from smoked and dried fish more than from meat stock. A hand-sized piece of smoked catfish or a fistful of dried shrimp goes into the pot early and dissolves into the sauce, contributing something between savoury and faintly bitter that no fresh fish reproduces. Bouillon cubes are also genuinely standard in Ivorian home kitchens and no cook there treats them as a compromise. Chilli comes mostly from small fiercely hot varieties, used whole to perfume a pot or crushed raw into a table sauce when the eater wants real heat.

The country splits roughly between the forested, lagoon-facing south and the drier savanna north. The south has the coast, the palm plantations and Abidjan, and with them cassava, seafood, palm oil and the maquis — open-air grill restaurants where fish and chicken are cooked over wood and served with attiéké until very late. The north, closer to Mali and Burkina Faso, leans on millet, sorghum, groundnuts, dried okra and grilled meat, with Senoufo and Malinké cooking that shares far more with Bamako than with the lagoon.

Abidjan is where the two meet and where street food is at its most inventive: garba kiosks selling fried tuna on attiéké, women frying alloco on the roadside at dusk, frozen ginger juice sold in knotted sachets. Ivorian cooks are also honest about the overlap with neighbours — attiéké and alloco are strongly identified with Côte d'Ivoire, groundnut and palm nut sauces are shared across the whole region, and arguing about which country owns which is a national pastime rather than a settled matter.