Philippines.

Start with vinegar, because almost everything does. Long before Spanish ships arrived, cooks across the archipelago preserved fish and meat by cooking it in vinegar and salt — the technique the Spanish later named adobo after their own marinating tradition, which is why a pre-colonial method carries a colonial name. The rule every Filipino cook knows is that vinegar must be allowed to boil without stirring for the first few minutes; disturb it early and the dish keeps a raw, throat-catching sharpness instead of mellowing into something round and savoury. That single instruction governs adobo, paksiw, kinilaw and half the pork dishes in the country.

The workhorse technique is gisa: garlic, then onion, then tomato, softened in oil until the tomato collapses and darkens. It opens sinigang, most vegetable dishes, and the rice-and-garlic breakfasts. Garlic in particular is used at a volume that surprises visitors — fried into golden chips, it is a condiment in its own right, scattered over rice, noodles and roast pork.

A large number of Filipino dishes are deliberately underseasoned in the pot, because seasoning happens at the table. The sawsawan — a small saucer of vinegar with crushed garlic and chile, soy with calamansi, or fermented shrimp bagoong — is not an optional extra but the missing half of the recipe. Kare-kare is the clearest case: a rich peanut stew that tastes flat and slightly sweet on its own, and only becomes itself when a spoonful of salty bagoong is stirred through each serving. Judging such a dish before dipping is the most common foreign mistake.

Coconut divides the map. North and central Luzon cook with vinegar, soy and broth; Bicol and much of the Visayas and Mindanao cook with coconut milk, often reduced until the oil breaks out, and with far more chile — Bicolanos are the acknowledged exception to the country's mild reputation. The Muslim south adds its own repertoire of turmeric, spiced grilled fish and dishes with no pork in them at all, which is a useful reminder that the pork-obsessed picture of Filipino food is a Christian-lowland one.

Rice sets the rhythm of the day. It appears at breakfast as sinangag, fried with garlic and yesterday's leftovers, alongside cured meat and a fried egg in the compound breakfasts named silog. It appears again at lunch and dinner, and between meals it turns up as kakanin — sticky rice cakes steamed in banana leaves with coconut and palm sugar — eaten during merienda, the mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack breaks that Filipinos treat as genuine meals rather than indulgences. Noodles, inherited from centuries of Chinese trade and now thoroughly local, carry their own obligation: pancit is served at birthdays, and the strands are never cut, because long noodles mean long life.