Peru.

The ají peppers are the cuisine's backbone and its color wheel. Ají amarillo — actually orange — brings fruity, medium heat and goes into more Peruvian dishes than any other single seasoning; ají panca, dried and deep red, gives smoky sweetness to marinades and stews; rocoto, apple-shaped and genuinely hot, is stuffed and baked in Arequipa. Most home cooking begins the same way: onion, garlic and ají paste sweated slowly into an aderezo, the sofrito-like base that everything else is built on.

Then there are the tubers and grains that Peru gave the world. Potatoes were domesticated near Lake Titicaca thousands of years ago, and Andean markets still sell varieties in purple, pink, black and gold; freeze-dried chuño, made by exposing potatoes to alternating night frost and daytime sun, is a preservation technique older than the Inca empire. Corn is just as varied — giant-kerneled choclo boiled alongside ceviche, cancha toasted into the crunchy bar snack that replaces bread, and purple maíz morado simmered into chicha morada, the sweet, spiced national drink. Quinoa and kiwicha, the high-altitude seed crops, round out the Andean pantry.

The coast cooks a different book entirely. The cold Humboldt Current makes Peruvian waters extraordinarily rich, and the cevichería — traditionally open only until the afternoon, because the fish came in that morning — is a national institution. Ceviche, tiradito, arroz con mariscos and chupe de camarones all belong to this shoreline kitchen, where lime, red onion and ají do the seasoning.

Migration wrote the next chapters. Some hundred thousand Cantonese laborers arrived in the mid-1800s, and their descendants opened the restaurants Peruvians call chifas; wok technique and soy sauce — sillao — fused with local ingredients to create dishes like lomo saltado and arroz chaufa that Peruvians consider entirely their own. Japanese immigrants arriving from the 1890s onward produced Nikkei cooking, which treated Peruvian fish with Japanese precision — shorter cures, cleaner cuts — and reshaped how the whole country eats ceviche.

Meals are anchored by the midday almuerzo, often a set menú of soup, a main and a drink. Anticuchos — skewers of ají panca-marinated beef heart — rule the evening streets, causa and papa a la huancaína open celebratory tables, and the pisco sour, shaken from grape brandy, lime and egg white, is the toast that starts them.