Myanmar.

The pantry is short, cheap and heavily weighted towards pulses. Rice is the centre, milled for the plate and ground into the thin vermicelli that carries mohinga, but chickpea flour is the ingredient that most often surprises outsiders: toasted, it thickens the coconut broth of ohn no khao swè and dresses the fat noodles of nan gyi thoke, and fried yellow split peas provide the hard crunch scattered over salads. Peanuts and peanut oil, sesame, dried shrimp, tamarind, turmeric and a great many onions do the rest. Two ingredients have no real equivalent elsewhere: ngapi, the fermented fish or shrimp paste that anchors nearly every savoury dish, and lahpet, tea leaves steamed and packed down to ferment for months until they are sour, bitter and soft enough to eat.

Three techniques define the cooking. The first is si pyan — frying a pounded allium paste far past the point that feels sensible, fifteen minutes or more, until it shrinks, darkens to the colour of wet brick and releases its oil. The second is thickening with toasted flours rather than reduction: rice flour toasted until it smells of popcorn, chickpea flour toasted to a sandy beige, whisked in to give broths the cloudy, clinging body that separates mohinga from every clear noodle soup in the region. The third is thoke, hand-mixing, which Burmese cooks treat as a category of dish in its own right — tea leaves, ginger, tofu, green mango, thick noodles and even broken samosas all get laid out in separate piles and then worked together with fingers so that oil, acid and dry powder reach every crevice.

A Burmese meal is a spread rather than a plate. Rice sits at the centre; the curry is a concentrated condiment eaten in small amounts, not a stew to drown the rice in; a clear broth called hin gyo is sipped throughout; and a plate of raw and blanched vegetables comes with a fermented dip. A thoke usually rounds it out, and lahpet often ends it, the bitterness and caffeine functioning as a full stop where another cuisine would serve something sweet. Breakfast is its own institution — mohinga from a dawn cart, eaten standing up in about four minutes.

The borrowings are obvious and Burmese cooks are relaxed about them. Wheat noodles, khao swè, came with Chinese trade. Danbauk, samusa thoke and the habit of thickening with pulse flour came with the enormous Indian population of colonial Rangoon, when Burma was administered as part of British India. Shan food, from the Tai-speaking eastern plateau, shares its fermented greens and low background heat with northern Thailand and Laos. What stays distinctly Burmese is the assembly: something intensely savoury at the centre, something sharp and raw to reset the palate, and something plain and liquid to drink between mouthfuls.