South Africa.

Maize is the floor the whole country stands on. It arrived from the Americas through Portuguese trade and displaced sorghum and millet over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today white maize meal cooked with salted water is the daily starch for the majority of households — stiff as pap or phutu, crumbly as krummelpap, loose as a breakfast porridge, under a different name in nearly every language spoken here. Its dominance has a hard edge: decades of near-total reliance on refined maize produced serious nutrient deficiency, which is why the fortification of maize meal and bread flour is now a legal requirement rather than a marketing claim. Alongside it sits samp — dried maize kernels stamped and hulled until they crack — which cooks for hours with sugar beans into the Xhosa dish umngqusho.

Fire is the second constant. A braai is not a barbecue with a different accent; it is an event with its own etiquette, built on wood or charcoal rather than gas, where the fire is lit long before anyone is hungry and the cook stands over it holding a drink while the coals burn down. Boerewors goes on in a coil, lamb chops and marinated chicken follow, and in the townships shisanyama culture turned the same fire into commerce — you buy raw meat at the butchery counter, hand it over, and eat it at a table outside. The three-legged cast-iron potjie works the same coals for stews cooked over several hours and never stirred.

The Cape kitchen runs on sweet against sour. Dried apricots, raisins, apricot jam and fruit chutney are treated as savoury seasonings, balanced with vinegar or lemon and warmed with turmeric, cinnamon, cloves and mild curry powder. This is the cooking of the Cape Malay community, whose ancestors were enslaved or exiled to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company, and it produced bobotie, denningvleis, bredies and the syrup-soaked koesister. Wheat baking came from the same colonial households: vetkoek, roosterkoek grilled on the braai grid, and rusks dried overnight in a cooling oven.

Durban is a curry city on its own terms. Indentured labourers brought to the Natal sugar estates from 1860, and the traders who followed them, built a style that is hotter, redder and more chilli-forward than most Indian regional cooking, leaning on a coarse blended masala, curry leaves, whole cinnamon and star anise, and thickening with potato rather than cream. Bunny chow — curry served inside a hollowed loaf — came out of that city, and so did a large share of the country's everyday chilli tolerance.

Township cooking is where these lines blur most usefully. Chakalaka mixes grated vegetables, curry powder and tinned baked beans into a relish that belongs to no single tradition; kota, a quarter loaf packed with chips, polony and atchar, is Soweto's answer to the bunny; braai meat, pap and a sharp mango atchar make a plate that a Cape Town kitchen and a Durban one would both recognise in parts. Add peri-peri chicken from the Mozambican border and biltong dried in a cupboard, and the range of a single South African week becomes clear.