Trinidad and Tobago.

Start with green seasoning, because almost everything savoury does. Chadon beni (culantro, the long serrated leaf that tastes like cilantro turned up loud) is blended with thyme, scallion, garlic, celery leaf, onion and mild pimento peppers into a coarse green paste that lives in a jar in the fridge. Chicken, fish, goat and beef are rubbed with it and left overnight — Trinis call this "seasoning up," and skipping it is the single clearest marker of food cooked by someone who did not grow up eating this. The second base is browning: brown or white sugar melted alone in hot oil until it foams, darkens past amber and begins to smoke faintly. Meat dropped into that stage of caramel comes out deep mahogany with a bittersweet edge that no amount of soy sauce or gravy browning imitates.

The Indo-Trinidadian kitchen supplies the curry half of the national repertoire. Trinidadian curry powder is its own blend — heavy on turmeric and coriander, generous with roasted ground cumin, which locals call geera — and it is almost never sprinkled dry. It is slaked with water into a slurry, poured into hot oil with garlic and fried until the water cooks off and the paste darkens and smells toasted rather than dusty, a step called chunkaying. Only then do the chickpeas, potato, duck, goat or crab go in. Roti shops sell the results wrapped in dhalpuri, a flatbread layered with seasoned ground split peas, or scooped with buss up shut, paratha beaten on the tawa until it shreds. Amchar masala, a sour, fenugreek-forward finishing blend, goes in at the end.

The Creole side of the kitchen runs on coconut milk, salt meat, ground provisions and the pot. Callaloo — dasheen leaves and okra swizzled smooth with coconut milk and crab or salted pigtail — anchors Sunday lunch beside stew chicken, macaroni pie and a plate of provisions: dasheen, cassava, yam, sweet potato and green fig boiled and eaten as starch. Oil down, cook-up rice, fish broth and pelau all belong to this half, where one pot does everything and the seasoning goes in raw at the start rather than as a finishing flourish.

Street and roadside food is a genuine national institution, not a tourist add-on. Doubles are breakfast, sold from carts before seven in the morning. Bake and shark belongs to Maracas Bay, corn soup and pholourie to the roadside at night, aloo pie and saheena to the roti shop counter, souse and black pudding to Saturday. Everything is finished at a condiment bar the customer controls: chadon beni sauce, tamarind, mango chutney, kuchela, pepper.

Tobago cooks differently enough to notice. The smaller island is more African-Creole and less Indian, its signature dish is curry crab and dumpling eaten with the hands, and coconut, breadfruit and reef fish dominate where Trinidad reaches for curry and roti. Both islands share the festival calendar, which drives some of the best cooking of the year: pastelles, black cake, ponche de crème and sorrel at Christmas; sweets and vegetarian food for Divali; sawine for Eid; and corn soup at four in the morning during Carnival.