Netherlands.

The backbone is the potato, and specifically the mash. Stamppot — potatoes boiled with a vegetable and crushed together with butter and milk — covers most of the Dutch winter: with kale (boerenkool), with endive stirred in raw (andijviestamppot), with sauerkraut, with carrot and onion (hutspot). The unwritten rule is the kuiltje: you press a well into your mash with the back of the spoon and fill it with gravy or the juices from the meat, so every forkful is seasoned rather than the plate being drowned. Almost all of it is one-pan food, invented by farming households that had one fire, one pot and a great many potatoes.

Dairy is the second pillar and the country's main culinary export. Gouda, Edam, Leiden cheese studded with cumin, Frisian nagelkaas with cloves — cheese is a breakfast and lunch food here, sliced thin with a cheese slicer onto buttered bread, not a course after dinner. Butter goes into the mash and under everything on bread; karnemelk (buttermilk) is drunk cold with a meal; cream and milk thicken soups. A Dutch lunch is typically brood: two or three slices of bread with cheese, ham or, unapologetically, chocolate sprinkles.

The sea and the art of preserving shaped the rest. Herring built medieval Dutch wealth, and the gibbing method — removing the gut but leaving the pancreas so its enzymes ripen the flesh in light brine — is still exactly how Hollandse Nieuwe is made each spring. Smoked eel from the IJsselmeer, mussels and oysters from Zeeland, and salted, dried and pickled everything are the older coastal repertoire. Sour and sweet-sour flavours run through the meat cooking too: hachee and draadjesvlees both lean on vinegar, bay and clove, a taste that goes straight back to the spice-trade centuries.

Indonesian food is not a foreign cuisine in the Netherlands; it is part of the weekly rotation, and its presence is inseparable from colonial history. The Dutch East Indies were ruled and exploited for over three centuries, and after Indonesian independence in 1949 several hundred thousand people — Indo-Europeans, Moluccans, repatriates — arrived in the Netherlands and brought their kitchens with them. Rijsttafel, the colonial banquet of dozens of small Indonesian dishes served at once, was itself a Dutch construction imposed on Indonesian food, and it is remembered critically in Indonesia even as it thrives in Dutch restaurants. What is uncomplicated is how deep the everyday absorption goes: sambal on the table, satésaus poured over fries, nasi and bami sold in supermarkets, and toko shops in every city. Later arrivals layered on further — Surinamese roti and broodje pom, Turkish and Moroccan bakeries, and the Rotterdam shawarma shops that produced the kapsalon.

Sweet baking is its own department, and it belongs to coffee rather than dessert. Stroop — thick beet or apple syrup — glues stroopwafels together and goes over pancakes; speculaas is spiced with cinnamon, clove and white pepper and pressed into carved wooden moulds; appeltaart is tall, cinnamon-heavy and served with unsweetened whipped cream. The Dutch eat these mid-morning or mid-afternoon with coffee, in strictly rationed quantities, and rarely at the end of dinner.