Libya.

Start with the spice cupboard, because it explains most of what a Libyan pot tastes like. Hararat (also spelled hrarat, and known in some households as bzaar) is a ground blend built around cinnamon, turmeric, black pepper, cloves and nutmeg — warm and slightly sweet rather than pungent. It goes in early, fried with tomato paste so the raw edge cooks off, and it is the reason a Libyan lamb sauce smells different from an Egyptian or Moroccan one made from broadly similar ingredients. Alongside it sit cumin and caraway, which pair up almost automatically whenever fish or harissa is involved, and dried mint, which Libyans use with a heavier hand than most of their neighbours — crumbled into soup at the very end, where its perfume survives instead of boiling away.

Tomato paste deserves its own paragraph. In much of Libyan home cooking it is not a background thickener but the main colouring and sweetening agent, spooned in generously and fried in oil until it turns brick-dark and the fat around it runs orange. That fried-paste stage is the doneness signal to watch for: before it, a sauce tastes tinny and sharp; after it, it tastes round and finished. The same move opens shorba, mbakbaka, hraimi and the sauce that surrounds bazin.

Grains split the country in two directions. Barley is the older staple, ground into the flour that makes bazin and toasted into bsisa, and it carries the flavour of pre-oil Libya — lean, inland, tied to the herding economy of the steppe. Semolina couscous is the coastal and celebratory grain, steamed over the meat pot so it takes on the broth's aroma. And then there is pasta: three decades of Italian colonial rule left Libya with a genuine pasta habit that never went away, so spaghetti and macaroni turn up in tomato-and-lamb sauces that would look at home in Sicily except for the hararat and the chickpeas.

Meals are structured around one central dish rather than courses. A Libyan lunch is typically a single large platter — couscous, bazin, a pasta pot, a tray of stuffed vegetables — set down with bread, a bowl of harissa or hot pepper paste, olives, and a plain salad of chopped tomato, cucumber and onion dressed with lemon and olive oil. Soup, especially the tomato-and-orzo shorba, is a course of its own mainly in Ramadan, when it opens the fast alongside dates and bread.

Regional differences are real but quieter than in Morocco. The western coast around Tripoli is the most Mediterranean and the most Italian-influenced, and it is also where the largest share of Libya's seafood cooking sits. The east around Benghazi leans further towards Egyptian habits and eats more rice. The Amazigh towns of the Nafusa Mountains hold on to barley, olive oil and dried-food traditions, and the Saharan south — Fezzan, Ghadames, Ghat — cooks with dates, camel and millet, and shares more with the Sahel than with the coast. Libyan Jewish communities, most of whom left in the mid-twentieth century, carried hraimi and bsisa with them to Israel, where both dishes are now better documented than they are at home.