Jamaica.

Seasoning in Jamaica happens early and it happens by hand. Meat is rubbed the night before with salt, black pepper, thyme, chopped scallion, garlic, pimento and pepper, then left in the fridge so the marinade works into the muscle rather than sitting on it. Many cooks add a splash of vinegar or lime to "wash" the meat first — a habit inherited across the Caribbean, done in a bowl of water with citrus or vinegar before the seasoning goes on. By the time the pot is lit, the flavour is already inside the protein, and the cooking is mostly about texture.

The two dominant savoury techniques are browning and slow braising. Brown stew — used for oxtail, chicken and fish — starts with caramelised sugar burned in oil until it is almost black and smoking, at which point the meat is dropped in and coated. That burnt sugar, sometimes reinforced with bottled browning sauce, gives the mahogany colour and the faint bitterness that keeps the finished gravy from being merely sweet. Curry works differently: Jamaican curry powder, heavy on turmeric and warmer than most Indian blends, is "burnt" in hot oil for a minute before the meat goes in, so the raw powdery edge cooks off. Both methods then need time — oxtail and goat want two to three hours until the collagen surrenders.

Frying is the other half of the repertoire, and it is shallow and hot rather than deep. Whole snapper is scored and fried until the skin crackles, then drowned in vinegar boiled with carrot, onion and pepper, which is escovitch — the local descendant of the Iberian escabeche that arrived with Sephardic Jewish settlers. Dumplings go into the same style of pan: fried dumpling for breakfast, sweet cornmeal festival to sit beside jerk, boiled spinners to thicken a soup. Bammy, made from grated cassava, is the oldest of them, a Taino flatbread that outlived the people who invented it.

A proper plate is starch-forward and built for sharing. Sunday dinner means rice and peas cooked in coconut milk, a stewed or curried meat, a vegetable side such as steamed callaloo or cabbage, fried plantain and often a slice of hard dough bread. Breakfast is savoury and substantial: ackee and saltfish, callaloo, liver, mackerel run down, served with boiled green banana, yam, dumpling and breadfruit — the group of starches called simply "food" or "provisions". Soup is a fixed institution, particularly on Saturdays, when red peas soup or cow foot soup carries the household through the day.

Regional variation is real but subtle on an island this size. Portland and the northeast claim jerk as their own through the Maroon communities of the Blue Mountains, and pimento wood still burns there. The south coast, especially Little Ochie in St Elizabeth, is where fish and lobster are cooked over open fires by the water. Kingston drives the patty shops, the Chinese-Jamaican and Indian-Jamaican influences, and the export version of the food. And the diaspora — London, Toronto, New York, Miami — has become a second home for the cuisine, where the patty and the jerk pan travel further than any menu on the island itself.